


On the Road

by FernWithy



Series: The Wedding Guitar [5]
Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Actors, Afterlife, Child Abandonment, Circus, Fame, Family, Family History, First Love, Growing Up, Guitars, Hell, Home, Love at First Sight, Multi, Mummies, Music, Musicals, Travel, Vikings, War, learning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 20:58:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16291679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernWithy/pseuds/FernWithy
Summary: Short pieces related to "The Road Home," featuring several different characters in different times.1. The mother who once abandoned Héctor tries to help him in the land of the dead.2. Hector barely avoids fading away altogether after Miguel disappears from the land of the dead.3. Rosa and Tia Gloria take a trip to investigate Mama Imelda's background4. Luisa Saavedra learns a secret about the Rivera family5. The Muertopedia entry about Héctor and Frida's play6. The Riveras' friends in the capital are inspired by them to build their own dynasty7. Ernesto plots to use dark magic to escape his fate8. When Hector finds Miguel away from home for Dia de Muertos, he has a chat with Enrique instead.9. Miguel had expected to fit in at the conservatory better than he did at home, but things haven't worked out quite as planned.10. Before his big movie break, Ernesto sees a mummy at a circus.11. Miguel learns to make guitars--and other lessons in adulthood--the summer he is seventeen.





	1. Los Penitentes

**Author's Note:**

> It's my custom at my blog when I finish a long story to ask readers to challenge me, or request stories or scenes related to the story. So, when I finished "The Road Home," I asked for ten requests. I only got seven, so I added three questions from AO3 readers from the comments, so, you know, it seemed fair to add the challenges here. They're all different eras, all different characters. I'll post each as a chapter.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the request, "Something about Hector's mother's afterlife :)" for sonetka

Maribel didn’t talk about what she’d done.

She didn’t go looking for the one she’d done it to, either. She had no right to his forgiveness.

But she thought of what she’d done. She thought of it every day. She replayed it in her mind.

The baby had come to her when she was barely sixteen. The birth had been almost ridiculously easy, after her increasing panic over the subject for last two months of her pregnancy. The Boy—the baby’s father—had been dead for seven months. He had never known. She could barely bring him into her mind now. He’d had a beautiful voice, the voice of an angel. But she only remembered his name because she’d given it to her son: Héctor. She didn’t know paterno or materno for him, nor did he for her. They were building a new world. They didn’t want to start with old baggage. Or so they’d told one another. He’d been a year older than she was, easily the youngest man in the group, and how he had sung and danced when he’d come through her village! And she taken her things, rolled them into a blanket, and slung them over her back to follow him. But what had they talked about as they rode through the mountains? What had he loved, other than those dreams? Where had he come from?

She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if she had forgotten, or if they’d just never talked about it before he died.

They had left together, and they thought of themselves as married, though there was nothing to record it. The older men in their group had thought it was funny, but it hadn’t been. The Boy had been sweet and lovely, and even now, Maribel did not regret that choice. And he had loved her. That much, she had never doubted.

She still remembered his sweet voice, the way he’d sung by the fire when he’d come through her village, the way he’d sung by dozens of campfires on the trail, as their little band had burned and robbed their way toward an upcoming paradise on earth, where the meek wouldn’t wait for any inheritance, but would rise up and take back what was theirs.

She had written his songs, though her Spanish had never been very good (it seemed not to matter here; she could talk to everyone). He had translated from her Zapoteco verses when they were out of the cloudy mountains, and sung their rebellious little ballads in villages too small for the maps, in the alleyways of big cities, in the fields beside the workers they hoped to recruit.

They’d been together for a few months when he was shot. He hadn’t been singing or recruiting at the time. They had been sneaking into a henhouse to steal eggs for breakfast. Maribel had gone inside and was gathering eggs while he guarded the place, and suddenly, he had hissed, “Rurales. Hide.”

She rolled under a table and covered herself in hay, and looked out through a niche in the wall of the coop. The moon was full. He’d never had a chance to run, but he stuck his hands under his coat, as if he were the one leaving the chicken coop with his hands full of eggs.

They didn’t shout for him to halt in the name of the law, or ask what he was doing. They just shot.

And laughed.

Maribel saw them through the niche as she tried not to scream. Most were Rurales with sombreros and uniforms. The head man was in white and riding a horse. He dismounted, toed the body, and turned it over. “Well, look who it is,” he said. “The Bardo Bandido. Too bad he didn’t bring his guitar. We could have hung it up with him.”

They laughed again, then tied up his body and dragged it behind the horse. She had never seen him again.

She hadn’t been feeling well, but she hadn’t really known why. At first, after he died, she blamed her continued queasiness on grief, but then her belly had begun to swell, and she’d been so afraid. All the time, afraid. Even through the ridiculously easy birth, and even after it.

She remembered her three weeks as a mother. She’d been very, very bad at it. Her milk didn’t always want to come. The baby cried loudly when the others in her little band were planning raids, and he annoyed them, and she couldn’t calm him down, except by singing loudly, which didn’t help her situation. There was only one other person in the group who spoke Zapoteco now that The Boy was gone—an old woman who blamed her for The Boy’s death—and her own Spanish was still spotty, despite a year on the road with these brigands. The Boy had always translated for her. No one else bothered.

But she wanted to fight with them. She was still driven by the idea of the new world they wanted to bring into being, a world where her people got back what belonged to them, where everyone had a chance to flourish. A world where no one had power. Her heart swelled at the black and red of the anarchists’ signs. It was important work, even if it didn’t always feel that way.

And they’d been clear: They were not anyone’s nursery.

“They never wanted you,” the old woman had said. “All you do is write songs that are no good outside Ben ‘Zaa lands.”

“People like my songs!” Maribel said, trying to shift the baby so he wouldn’t squirm while she fed him. “People always listened when he sang them.”

“When he sang the translations he had to make of them.”

“They’re still my words… just in Spanish. I know enough to recognize them. And anyway, Magón himself was half Zapotec!”

“Yes, but he troubled to learn the languages of people he was trying to talk to.”

“I’m trying.”

She snorted. “You don’t even understand your own baby’s crying. Put your hand behind his head, you stupid girl, or he’ll never shut up.”

Feeling miserable, Maribel rocked the baby, pressing her hand tightly against his head. Tomorrow, they would be moving north again, out of range of anyone who would understand her. They were camping now outside a village called Santa Cecilia Momaquixtia. She had sung in the square today. The town was named for the patron saint of music, and enough people understood her to be moved by the vision of a new world. A Spanish lady had sat on the benches sewing, and listening avidly as a young girl translated for her. She had come later, when Maribel was trying to feed the baby, and, with the girl’s help, expressed her desire to help with the fight.

But there was no room for another old woman. She had given Maribel food and milk, and—

Her thoughts were interrupted by the baby letting out another squeal.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Come on, little one. I don’t know what to do. What do you need? What do you want me to do, I’ll do it…”

But of course, the baby spoke no language at all, and couldn’t tell her what he needed. And maybe she couldn’t even provide it if he could. He was working fruitlessly at her breast.

The flap of her tent came up, and Poldo came in and barked at the old woman.

She looked at Maribel and translated (unnecessarily), “He said to shut the baby up, or you’re not coming along tomorrow. It’s one thing for him to make noise here, but when we have a mission…” She shook her head in deep distaste.

And there was no other reason for what Maribel did.

She had wanted to keep having adventures, to keep stirring the soul of the Revolution until it would finally sweep the world away.

And so, when the rest of the camp had fallen asleep, she had picked up the squirming infant, wrapped him in the blanket she’d brought from her village (she would pick up a bag somewhere later), tucked a piece of paper with his name on it in beside him, and brought him back into the plaza in Santa Cecilia.

The night streets were quiet and seemed safe, even near the tavern. She passed pretty little houses owned by pretty little people. She passed a house where a little boy, probably meant to be sleeping, was staring out the window instead. He ducked down beneath the sill when he saw her looking. She passed the little cemetery, and the church beside it, where the sisters had planted beans.

It crossed her mind to leave the baby with the sisters. He wouldn’t be the only one. She could take him to the door, and see that he was safe, and maybe have a meal, and maybe someone would say, “Maribel, you stay as well, and you’ll have a warm bed and help with the baby and…”

She braced herself. That was the old way. The sisters, the padres, all of them would be swept away. 

So she wandered back into Mariachi Plaza, where a few drunken musicians were sleeping in doorways. She looked up, and saw the flicker of lamplight in a window. Through it, she could see the Spanish woman from earlier, pinning a dress on a form. She had a home. She had food to share. She believed in the cause.

And she had to be better at this business than Maribel was.

Maribel moved the baby and looked down into his little face. He had The Boy’s big brown eyes, and she could imagine him growing up, thin and lithe, with that bright smile, and the voice…

But she would never hear it, not really.

“Héctor,” she said. “I have to do this. I have a work to do in the world, and you’ll be better with someone who can… who knows what she’s doing. You’ll be fine. I know you’ll be fine. You don’t need me.”

For once, he wasn’t crying. He put one chubby little fist in his mouth and sucked on it.

She wrapped the blanket tightly around him and set him down on the cobblestones.

She turned her back.

There could be wolves. Or cougars. Or one of the sleeping mariachis might wake up and maybe he was the cruel sort. Or…

Maribel bit her lip and picked up a stone.

She threw it at the seamstress’s window, and heard it shatter as she ran away to the sounds of the woman’s outraged scream and the baby’s renewed helpless cries.

She didn’t look back.

Not then.

At least not with her eyes.

In her dreams, for the few months she had left in the land of the living, the baby screamed and screamed, and she couldn’t find him. She was gone from Santa Cecilia only hours after leaving him. She couldn’t go back. And after coming here, the chance seemed to be gone forever anyway.

She didn’t deserve to go back. She would never deserve to go back.

Like most people in this part of the city, she kept to herself. They rarely met each other’s eyes here, and never danced or sang. They weren’t unkind to each other, like the Odiados, and they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon, like the poor Olvidados. They simply existed, remembered in some way by the living, but not cared for, not loved, living in something like a bland hotel—somehow both severe and comfortable. It was just a quiet corner of eternity, a place to think about what they’d done.

And think.

And think.

She had still been leaking milk at inconvenient times when she died.

She’d gone back to the camp. She was saving the world—or would be—after all. Two months after she’d left the baby, they’d decided to make a run on a hacienda—recruit some workers, steal some food, and remind the owners that their time was over.

She had no idea who actually shot her. It had come from behind. It had felt like a shove, and she’d fallen forward into marigold petals and there was no one she knew and she was alone. She’d looked for the Boy, but all she’d been able to learn was that a boy with a golden voice had appeared briefly and disappeared again, forgotten by the living.

But my family remembers me, she thought, looking at the cover of Mas Alla, where Héctor’s living face—as painted by Frida Kahlo—stared out at her, looking as much like his father as she had known he would when she’d looked down at him in her arms, still shocked at the idea that she had a son. Her family must remember her and speak her name, because she was still here, all of these long years later. Still thinking about it all.

About what she had done. Her son had started his life being abandoned by the one person who should have loved him above all others. Then, according to the article, he’d been ejected from the home of the woman who had taken him in. Then he had been betrayed and murdered by his best friend, who destroyed his memory so his descendants also abandoned him.

And yet, he somehow still smiled when people spoke to him. He laughed when she saw him on stage in the plaza (which she did every time he appeared). 

Someone passed by outside her door (which she rarely locked; almost no one here did), and she looked up at the motion. It was Ramon, a boy who had taken some kind of drug in the nineteen-sixties, to the point that it killed him. He believed he’d done it deliberately. He smiled at her. “Still here, Maribel?”

“Still here.”

“Me, too. I’m waiting for my sister.”

“Is she coming?”

“Maybe soon. Maybe not. But I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

“Do you think she’ll care?”

“I don’t know. She puts up my picture. I go see her. She never knows I’m there.”

Maribel nodded.

Ramon waited a minute, then said, “Are you going to the trial again tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“No.”

He frowned. “You should. He might forgive you. You could get out of here.”

“I belong here.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. My family has a long memory.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What makes you think I’ll do anything?”

He pointed wordlessly at a small table, where her bandoleras had appeared, fully loaded, when the trial of Ernesto de la Cruz had begun. She’d thought she’d lost them years ago, when she’d shed them at the end of the marigold bridge.

She shrugged.

“I hear his wife doesn’t want to win the trial.”

“Really?”

“She wants de la Cruz in Odiados, but she’ll get into trouble if she sends him there.”

“And he’d lose his wife.” Maribel nodded. “Well, I guess I know what I’m doing next, then. If it comes to it. If anyone else comes to my room after I’m in a cell, tell them they can have my things.”

“Are you insane?” Ramon sighed. “You can’t be thinking what I think you are.”

“Oh, I am. Maybe it will be enough.”

Ramon sat down. “Enough for who? You don’t know what your boy will think. You don’t know what he’ll say. Maybe he has a millions question for you. So how would you know what’s enough for him. And nothing is enough for you.”

“I don’t see you moving up very quickly either.”

“I committed a mortal sin. You were sixteen and scared.”

“That wasn’t why I did it.”

“Mierda.”

“Even if it was. I read the stories about him. He was once sixteen and scared, too. And he got married, and he bought a house, and he loved his wife and his daughter. He wrote a lullaby. I never wrote a lullaby. I could have at least done that. His father would have. At least, I think he would have. If he’d had a chance.”

“So, write one now.”

“He’s a hundred and eighteen years old. I think the window of opportunity may have passed.” Maribel sighed and stood up, pulling her bandoliers on over her shoulders. “No, Ramon. There’s one thing I can do for him that might count.”

“You don’t even know if it’s what _he_ wants.”

“Maybe not. But I’ve been watching him in court. If that de la Cruz bastard is sitting in a cell where he can be reached, Héctor will keep going back, letting it twist his skull around. He should be free of it. I can at least do that for him.”

“And end up in a cell yourself?”

“What do you think this place is?”

She went to the door and leaned on the frame for a moment, looking back into her room. There was nothing here that mattered.

“Maribel, I just don’t think… I’m not sure your judgment is very good about this.”

She smiled wearily. “Why should that change now?”

And without another word, she headed out on what she hoped would be her last mission.


	2. Fading

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt, "Would love to see how Hector recovers from his brush with Final Death after Miguel is sent home and what prompts Imelda to take him back" for willowbough

Héctor registered Miguel’s disappearance as a blurry flash of orange light. Beyond it, he could see almost nothing. He felt some vital part of himself go as well, fly out into the night. He felt cold stone beneath him and saw sunlight on the guitar.  Miguel ran, and that far, distant part of Héctor ran with him, free and strong, but so small.  Not enough.  
  
Most of him was here, and he couldn’t keep himself together much longer.  
  
On his other side, he could see Imelda, a shadow against the light rising from the stage, and maybe the light of the sunrise. She was still holding his hand, the marigold petal still clasped in his fingers, its glow fading.  Héctor lost his grip on it and it drifted off in an air current. He watched it flutter up over Imelda’s shoulder and then hover above the drop before disappearing.  
  
There was a huge clatter of footsteps from somewhere, and bright flashes of light.  Voices were calling out.  He heard Julio say, “This is a family moment!” but it did no good.  The twins’ voices were raised as well, but the clamor was drowning them out.  
  
“Señora Rivera!” someone shouted—someone far away, a world away. “Señora, is it true? Is Ernesto de la Cruz guilty of murder?”  
  
“Not now,” Imelda said heavily, squeezing Héctor’s hand. “It’s reporters.  God, not now.  Pepita.”  
  
There was a commotion, and then what little Héctor could see of the rest of the family was blocked by the bright blue form of Pepita, who had spread her wings and was growling. Dante, who had come to sit by Héctor’s head, was crouched on his haunches, snarling at something in the shadows.  
  
“Señor Rivera! Is it true that—?”  
  
But the rest of the reporter’s question faded into nothing. Pepita was a blur. Dante’s snarls were just an undertow in the current carrying Héctor away.  
  
Imelda’s hand remained real, but soon, his hand would separate from his body. His feet already seemed to be gone. He couldn’t see them or feel them, but he felt like his ankles had given way, like the least important parts of him were already being given up. The far off part saw the streets passing around him, saw the walls of the workshop rise up, heard someone yell, “Miguel!”  
  
“Don’t you let go,” Imelda whispered. “Don’t think of it, Héctor, not when we haven’t talked this out. Don’t you _dare_ leave me again, do you hear me? Don’t you dare.”  
  
He tried to smile. “I’m not sure I have a choice.”  
  
“You said that before. ‘We need the money, Imelda, I have to go.’ But now you say you meant to come home, so _don’t you dare leave._ I’m not kidding, Héctor.”  
  
Absurdly, a laugh came up from somewhere in his chest. It was weak and breathy, but real. “I don’t think it works that way, mi alma.”  
  
“It does if I say it does.” She touched his face, then reached down and took his other hand. “You are going to hold out until Miguel gets Coco to remember. And he will do it. He’s a stubborn, willful boy, and that’s a useful thing to be.”  
  
“…wonder where that comes from…”  
  
“If it comes from me, then I am going to give it to you. Do you understand me, Héctor? Every bit of stubborn willfulness I have is yours right now. These are the things we promised when we married each other. What is mine is yours, and right now, I am giving you my anger, my will, and everything you need to keep going. I know it’s enough, because it got me through losing you, so don’t even try to tell me it won’t. You are going to hold on, and soon, everything will be all right.”  
  
“If you say so.”  
  
“I say so.”  
  
Héctor tried to grasp her hand more tightly, but his fingers didn’t respond. He thought of Chicharron saying that he couldn’t have played his guitar if he wanted to, and understood.  The thought of even holding the guitar, let alone making chords or strumming, was as distant as flying to the moon.  He could barely hold his wife’s hand.  
  
“Imelda, when I left…”  
  
“No.  Don’t talk about that.”  
  
“It was only supposed to be…”  
  
“No.  We’ll talk about that later, when you’re feeling better.”  
  
“Imelda…”  
  
“Do you hear me? No!  You are _not_ saying goodbye.”  
  
Another great shudder passed through him.  This time, he heard something clatter to the stage floor, and he was fairly sure it was a toe.  He’d watched people fade many times over the years in Olvidados.  He didn’t remember it being like this.  Just a moment in which the last of them let go, and the light poured out, and they disappeared.  Why was he losing hold so slowly?  
  
That was simple enough.  He was fighting.  
  
He hadn’t given up.  He hadn’t, because Miguel was fighting for him.  He hadn’t, because Imelda was holding his hand.  And because…  
  
“I still love you.”  
  
“I know that,” Imelda said.  “You always loved me…”  
  
“I did. I do.”  He managed to smile again.  “Everything else is going.  The music.  The memories.  But not that. I still love you. I still love Coco.  And Miguel.”  
  
“You thought you wouldn’t?”  
  
“ _You_ thought I wouldn’t.  You thought something else mattered more.”  
  
“Héctor…”  
  
“I was always afraid you were right.  That somewhere, it would all go away. But it doesn’t.  Even if I fade, Imelda. That will still be there.  I will always love you.  That will stay, even after me.”  
  
“You are not going anywhere, Héctor.”  
  
“If you say so,” he said again.  
  
“I do.  Héctor, I swear it.  You’ll stay here with me.   And when you’re feeling better, we’ll have it out about what happened.  You’ll tell me everything you want to say, and I’ll… I’ll yell at you and tell  you all the awful things you want me to feel about you.   And then I’ll say that I love you.”  
  
“You love me?”  
  
“You get to hear that tomorrow,  Héctor.  Tomorrow.  Do you understand? I will tell you that tomorrow.”  
  
“I heard you earlier, you know.  Something about the love of your life?”  
  
“Yes, well, we’re not in life anymore, are we?  So, you still have to wait until tomorrow to hear that you’re the love of my forever.”  
  
“I can’t promise…”  
  
“You don’t have to promise now.  You already promised.  At our wedding.”  
  
“That was all the days of my life.”  
  
“No.  No, you said it wrong.  I remember, because I loved you for saying it wrong.  You said for all of time.  So you already promised, and don’t you _dare_ break your promise again.”  She looked up to the sky,  where the pink of sunrise was fading to a fragile, beautiful blue.  “Sing to me, Héctor.”  
  
He wasn’t sure he heard her right.  “Sing?”  
  
“Sing, yes.  Open your mouth and make music come out of it.  You told Coco once, ‘If you can talk, you can sing.’  Was that a lie, Héctor? Of course it wasn’t. You never lied to Coco.  You can talk. So you can sing.”  
  
“I don’t _know_ if I can.”  
  
“We’ve already been over that. You can. No argument. Poco Loco.  Right now.”  
  
“Poco Loco? Really?”  
  
“Tell me I’m not making you loco right now.”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“What color is the sky? Ay, mi amor, ay, mi amor,” she sang. “You tell me that it’s red, ay, mi amor, ay, mi amor…” But the sky was almost white now, the delicate blue seeming to break up as the sun became too bright, too much.  Imelda leaned forward, spreading a shadow over his eye, and he could see again.  
  
“Where should I put my shoes?” he managed, not quite on key, not quite singing. “Ay, mi amor, ay… Ay…”   
  
Something stopped him. Some force, blocking the way.  He was back with that other part of himself, and the sun was bright and there was a closed door, but something was in the way. He heard Miguel begging to be let through, but it was so far away.  So far…  
  
“ _Mi amor!_ ” Imelda nearly shrieked. She took a deep and shaky breath, and her face came close enough that he could see her terror. “ _Ay, mi amor._ ”  
  
“Ay, mi amor… you say, put them on your head, ay mi amor, ay… mi…”  
  
“Amor. Amor.” She leaned forward. “Héctor. Please, oh, please, just hold on. Miguel has promised. He’ll want to see you again, too, in a very long time.  You have to be here when he comes.”  
  
“You… make… me… un poco… loco…”  
  
He didn’t know how he made it through the next minutes, except for Imelda’s voice, hectoring him through “Poco Loco,” even the later verses, the ones that Ernesto had never sung. Imelda remembered all the words. Every one of them. She wrapped the music around him like bandages, holding him together by the force of her will.  
  
But she was fading.  So much was fading. The small part of himself with Miguel, in the land of the living, seemed as real as anything else—and it was fading, too.  He could only see Miguel, could only feel strong arms holding him steady and comforting him.  Somewhere, someone was yelling at him to apologize to his Mamá Coco.  
  
Coco.  
  
Héctor let himself float up, away from Miguel.  He turned and…  
  
The guitar.  
  
The guitar was on the floor, gleaming in the sun.   
  
Héctor made a grab for it—for what reason, he didn’t know—but he was nothing here. He looked up, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, an old woman in trenzas, and then she was Coco, his Coco, and he remembered her voice.  
  
He fought.  
  
It was the hardest fight he had ever known.  A part of him wanted to let go, to shatter into nothing, to find out if anything came afterward, something easier, something where he was no longer Héctor, no longer the man who had hurt the people he loved.  Something peaceful and empty and…  
  
But he had promised to see Coco again.  He had _promised_.  
  
With an effort he didn’t understand, he managed to push Miguel, just a little bit. Just enough for his foot to bump the guitar.  
  
And to understand.  
  
Then he was back again, back at the stadium, and he couldn’t feel that other part anymore, if it was still there, if it had been anything but his imagination in the first place. Imelda had his hands, but his finger bones were coming loose, and she was holding his whole forearm, forcibly holding him together and saying, from some insurmountable distance, “Héctor, mi amor, mi alma, hold on, damn you, this is not over. Do you hear me, Héctor? Do you hear me? Do you…”  
  
But it wasn’t Imelda’s voice he heard.  
  
Somewhere, someplace he didn’t understand, he heard Coco begin to sing.  
  
_Each time you hear a sad guitar  
Know that I’m with you the only way that I can be  
Until you’re in my arms again…  
Remember me._  
  
He couldn’t open his eyes, but he saw clearly.  He saw Miguel, kneeling in a shaft of sunlight, the guitar on his knee. And he saw Coco, the woman she was, the girl she had been. She looked at him.    
  
Recognized him.  
  
Smiled.  
  
“Héctor!”  
  
Imelda’s voice came into the space, and Héctor opened his eyes.   
  
The world was clear. Pepita was still beside him. Dante was crouched by his head. He could feel his hands, his feet. He could feel Imelda’s hands around his.  
  
He squeezed her fingers.  
  
She gasped. “Héctor…”  
  
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m okay, I think I’m…”  
  
_Papá was a musician,_ Coco said somewhere.  
  
Strength came back into Héctor’s hands and arms, and into the empty space beneath his ribs where he still seemed to feel his essential self was located. Shaking, he sat up, Imelda bracing him.  
  
“She remembered,” Imelda said.  
  
Héctor nodded.  
  
“I told you, didn’t I? I told you that you could hold on. You need to listen to me more from now on.”  
  
He smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind. In the future.”  
  
She didn’t answer.  She just held him and took deep, shaky breaths.  
  
They could have stayed there like that for a minute, or a week, or a year.  Héctor didn’t know.  There was a lot they needed to talk about, but there was time for it. All the time in this eternal world.  
  
Pepita was still guarding against what seemed to be a crowd of reporters, all with microphones and notepads, wearing slouching hats with badges in them.  Héctor could see all this in great detail under Pepita’s wing.  He didn’t care.  His family was rushing around her now, coming back to him, after all these years.  
  
And somewhere, far away, the music of his life began to play again.  



	3. Rancho La Bella

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt, "Something from Rosa's perspective, please--maybe something with Rosa finding out about Mama Imelda's family" for Eleanor W

Rosa had only been across the Oaxaca state line once, when she had traveled with Mamá and Miguel to Mexico City last month to bring the record the nuns had found to Miguel’s music teacher.  She had spent most of the trip teasing Miguel about the girls she knew who liked him, which embarrassed him, and therefore never ceased to be an amusing topic of conversation.  They’d also been listening to music from his laptop, a fresh experience for everyone on road trips. There had been a violin concerto and a collection of old ranchera songs and Abel’s favorite hip hop group.  
  
In all, she’d paid no attention to the trip itself, and now, she was planning to really savor her time on the road.  The road she was on was smaller than the 135, running mostly through the country and little towns instead of being a feeder to big cities.  She was sure that she would really know she was away from home soon.  
  
Unfortunately, crossing the border into Guerrero was a disappointing experience. Other than a little federal inspection point, a dusty turnoff, and a billboard saying “Welcome to Guerrero” (sponsored by Telcel and featuring a cheerful looking woman on her phone), there was no real difference in the narrow road as it went northwest between fields. Finally, there was a green sign saying “Entering Guerrero, Leaving Oaxaca”—angled just over the entrance to a farm road—followed by… well, Guerrero. Which wasn’t all that different from Oaxaca.  
  
“Well,” said Tía Gloria, “looks like we’re here. Exciting, isn’t it?”  
  
“You’ve been on this road.”  
  
“Yes. Sorry, I tried to tell you that you wouldn’t see much.” She shook her head. “Honestly, even the national borders, you only know because there are people saying, ‘Anything to declare?’ The land doesn’t know where we put lines on it.”  
  
“It’s still _further_ than I’ve been in this direction,” Rosa said. “We could just keep driving, and eventually, the land would start looking different. It turns into a desert.”  
  
“True. But you won’t really notice until you’re so deep into the desert that it actually looks different. Real borders like that are much fuzzier. They don’t even get a sign in the road saying ‘Now entering the desert.’”  
  
“What about the people?”  
  
“Well, obviously, Guerrerenses are weird. Everyone knows that.”  
  
“What about on the big border?”  
  
“We’re not going that far. You don’t have a passport, and I don’t have time.”  
  
Rosa didn’t push it. Tía Gloria had crossed the big border a few times, going to business conferences in Texas and Arizona, but she’d already said that conferences and hotels didn’t count, so she couldn’t very well tell Rosa anything about the world outside of Mexico.  And she was already being pretty generous, driving her up here just to look at old land records.  
  
Anyway, it was interesting by itself, the way the border didn’t make any difference, and thinking about fuzzy borders, and how you don’t even really know when you cross them.  Rosa guessed that if she got air-dropped into Sonora or something—or, she supposed, just took a plane, though airports didn’t count any more than hotels—everything would seem very different, but just driving up, would she even notice, or would the land just keep getting a little scrubbier every mile until it was just the big empty?  
  
She checked her map. They’d be driving through the little city of Cuajinicuilapa, then on a little further before taking a turn onto a narrow side road that led northeast. It would come, eventually, to a village called Rancho La Bella, the remains of what had once been a huge land holding. In the confusing series of rebellions before the real revolution, its main house had burned and its owners had vanished.  
  
Rosa hadn’t been able to find anything online about who the owners of Rancho la Bella might have been. The story that Mamá Imelda had told Abuelita was that, when the twins were babies and she wasn’t big enough for school, she’d awoken in the night to find their nursery full of smoke, and the twins’ niñera coming after her with a gun. Her own niñera had rescued them and eventually brought them to Santa Cecilia’s orphan home. There hadn’t been any details of how far away it had been, or what the old rancho had grown, or what the parents had done. But this would fit.  A big ranchera, a fire (maybe in the night), missing hacendados… it would fit the story, if the story was true.  
  
“I want to find the niñera’s name,” Rosa said. “I mean, if it’s this one. There’s another burn-out in Morelos, and it could have been even further away. There were attacks in Michoacán, too.”  
  
“There were a lot of angry people. I don’t know if I want to know we were… well, responsible for them being angry.”  
  
“People have been angry at us in Oaxaca.”  
  
“Yes, but that’s for stupid reasons.  Not liking Mamá, or getting themselves into a twist about us doing well in business, as if it hurt them at all.  Mamá Imelda helped bring plumbing and electricity.  Would they rather not have them?”  Tía Gloria sniffed disdainfully.  “People in the Revolution had better reasons.”  
  
“Whoever they were, they weren’t exactly nice themselves, going into a nursery with guns.”  
  
“There were excesses.  There are always excesses in war.”  
  
Rosa looked out the window at Guerrero, not wanting to think too much about this.  She’d read everything the school had on the years coming up to the Revolution, and she didn’t like to think of Mamá Imelda’s parents as being what they must have been to have been burned out.  Or even to have two different niñeras for their children.  She didn’t want them to be the bad guys.  
  
But even if they were, they weren’t worse than people who would shoot children.  Children weren’t to be blamed for anything.  And Mamá Imelda’s niñera must have known that, because she saved them.  “Anyway, we don’t know how far they came to hide the children.  It could have been further than Guerrero.”  
  
Tía Gloria shifted down as they entered Cuajinicuilapa, “Well, let’s take them one at a time. Maybe there are baptism records here.”  
  
“There weren’t in the one in Chiapas. That matched, too. I called the church, and they said that the old records got wrecked in a storm. And the one right in Oaxaca—that might have been an accidental fire… anyway, the church there got closed down, and no one knew where the records were.”  
  
“You’ve been busy. How are you keeping up with school?”  
  
Rosa laughed. “Are you kidding? I have the best history grades in my whole class.”  
  
“All I’m saying is, you and your cousin are a little bit crazy on this.”  
  
Rosa shrugged, looking out the window at the town they were going through, which seemed poorer than Santa Cecilia, with lots of closed buildings and beggars on the streets. “Miguel got the big adventure. But I’m going to _prove_ something.”  
  
“Oh, so it’s a competition.”  
  
“No.” Rosa continued to watch the town go by. “It’s just not fair. I always tried to be good and he’s the one who has everyone talking about how he’s the most devoted son and everything. And I’m not mad. I’m glad he’s doing it, and it’s fun to be friends with him finally, with neither of us telling lies, but… I don’t know. I want to do something, too. I want them to be proud of _me_. And I feel like I _should_ do something.  I wish I could know something for sure like he does.  I mean, about them.  About how they feel.”  
  
Tía Gloria didn’t say anything. The town rolled away, past a bar and a white building with a blank sign, which Rosa thought was an abandoned hotel. Then there was a gas station, and then they were in the country again, driving between fields of lush green crops that Rosa didn’t immediately recognize.  They turned the first time beside a tree laden with leafy boughs that brushed the ditch beside the farm road, and once, in the distance, Rosa caught sight of a farm truck puttering through another field.  The greenery gave way to bright flowers as the crop changed to hibiscus—miles and miles of flowers.  
  
They almost missed the turn to Rancho La Bella, because it wasn’t much more than a gravel path through the field. It wound through the hills and finally came out at the tiniest village Rosa had ever seen. It consisted of a little adobe church that apparently also served as the town hall, with about five houses scattered around, all surrounded by the flowers. There were farm trucks here, and Rosa guessed that the only reason for the village’s existence was to have a convenient shipping address for agricultural orders. When she got out of the car, she expected to be almost knocked over by a floral smell, but there wasn’t really much of it. She supposed she should have spent more time on the hibiscus farms near home, but it had never occurred to her.  Had her ancestors farmed hibiscus flowers?  Or, if this had been their land, had it been home to some other crop then?  
  
The door of the little adobe building opened, and a man came out. He was black and wore little wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled at them. “Ah! The Riveras! I’m glad to meet you. I’ve been watching your story on the news.  I was thrilled when you e-mailed me!”  
  
Rosa smiled back. “Hi. I’m Rosa Rivera. This is my Tía Gloria.”  
  
“Tomas Peña. I’m the town clerk. Come in. I have things that might interest you. I’ve been looking since you called. You’ve caught everyone’s interest, really.  And I think… well, you’ll see.”  
  
Rosa and Tía Gloria followed him into the shadowy little building. The church’s sanctuary seemed to have room for about six parishioners and a priest, if they really squeezed. Beyond it, there was a tiny office, and Peña led them into it, slithering around the edge of the desk and pointing at two old wooden chairs that almost fit into the side of the room near the door. Rosa could sit relatively comfortably in hers. Tía Gloria’s knees were pressed into the desk.  
  
Peña picked up what looked like an old map, and unrolled it onto the desk. “You see here,” he said, “that all of this land was once owned by the Sandoval family, as much as it can be said to have been owned by anyone. We can track a lot of land transfers, but in all likelihood, these remained attached either by blood or social ties to the Sandovals. The ties are not always clear. A lot of trading around. Deals and counter-deals… the hacendados had very interesting ways of interacting with each other, and if you start following them…” He smiled. “Have you ever heard of a Mobius strip, niña?”  
  
Rosa nodded. “You start tracing it on one edge, but by the time you finish, you’re on the other edge, except without ever lifting your finger.”  
  
“Exactly. So don’t hope for a great deal of clarity beyond what I _can_ tell you, which is that the owner of much of this land in 1899, the year you mentioned, a man named Manuel Alvarez Cruz, and his wife, Leonora Amado Santos de Alvarez, were listed as the parents of a baby girl who was called Imelda.  They owned all of this land.  Farming hibiscus, just as we do now.  Four years later, there is a mention in the parish records of the baptism of twin boys, though their actual baptism records are long since lost.”  
  
“Were they Oscar and Felipe?”  
  
“There are no names in the listing we have,” Peña said.  “But I did follow the names.  The woman, Leonora, had a brother called Oscar who was a witness at their wedding.  I didn’t find anyone called Felipe, but that means little.”  
  
“This sounds right,” Rosa said.  “But how could we tell? For real?”  
  
Peña gave her a sympathetic smile.  “If you’re looking for certainty in the records, you may be at the end of the line with your tatarabuela.  Records are gone.  There’s no bloodline to test against, at least nothing close enough to matter.  Oscar Amado died childless, and as far as I can tell, he was the only close blood relative, other than the children.  There’s no family you could connect to.  That world has passed away.  The best we can do is guesses.”  
  
Rosa’s heart sank, even though he wasn’t telling her anything new.  She wondered if, given the right combination of factors, she could get herself cursed into the land of the dead long enough to ask Mamá Imelda if she remembered having had an uncle called Oscar, or if her house had been surrounded by hibiscus flowers.  
  
She suspected this might be beyond her reach.  She’d just have to wait to actually die, and then she wouldn’t be able to send word back.  And she wasn’t quite so dedicated to this task that she wanted to get that answer any earlier than she would in the normal course of things.  
  
Mamá Imelda might not remember anyway.  
  
“Imelda Alvarez Amado,” she tried.  “Maybe I could look and see if this Imelda ever showed up anywhere else.   If she did, she can’t be my Mamá Imelda.  They called her Rivera at the sisters’ home, and added ‘Reyes’ because she acted like a princess. Sort of a nasty joke.”  
  
“I’ve heard of orphans with nastier joke names.  Foundlings were actually called ‘Esposito,’ as if they’d been deliberately exposed with the hope that they’d die.”  
  
Rosa decided not to mention that she was quite familiar with “Esposito” as well.  
  
Peña may have heard it despite her not saying it, but he tactfully went on. “I already did some research for you.  I admit, there’s very little to do here as a clerk, and I’ve been diving into this.  I’ve searched records in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Morelos, Puebla… even Veracruz.  There’s no record of Imelda Alvarez Amado.  Nothing about an adoption, no marriage, no passage booked out of the country.  When the house burned…”  He took a deep breath.  “This is not a pleasant topic.”  
  
Rosa looked at Tía Gloria, who wasn’t giving much of a hint of her feelings, then back at Peña. “What happened?”  
  
“Please understand that it was a confusing time in history and not everything was recorded. This was a small rancho, as far as things go, long split off from the big land holdings…”  
  
“What did they do?” Tía Gloria asked quietly.  
  
“Do?”  
  
“These people.  The owners whose  house was burned.  The ones who owned miles and miles of this ‘small rancho.’”  
  
“Well, not much is known…”  
  
“You’re being evasive. If it’s possible they were targeted by rebels, then what did they do? Did they… kill people? Steal from them? Enslave them? What did they do?”  
  
He sighed. “We don’t have a lot of information. We know Alvarez was an officer under Diaz. We know his men tended to be a bit trigger happy, but not if it was because he ordered them to be so.   He would have been expected to protect his land and holdings.”  
  
“When you say trigger-happy…” Rosa started.  
  
“The story that’s told—please understand that we have only one side left—is that thieves and brigands were shot on sight and sometimes… You’re too young.”  
  
“I’m not.  I’ve read about the hacendados.  Were they burned? The people?  Is that why the house was set on fire?”  
  
Peña sighed, resigned. “Burned, sometimes.  Hung on posts as examples.  If they weren’t killed outright, they were beaten.  There are stories people have passed down about things done to their ancestors before the Revolution.  I don’t know how many are true, and how many are just… prologues made up to glorify what came after.  There’s some of that, too. The record doesn’t clarify it one way or the other.  All it tells me is a rank.”  
  
“And the wife?” Tía Gloria asked after a minute.  
  
“We don’t know much at all.” Peña got out another sheaf of papers.  “The Amado family was local. Well-to-do, though not on the level of the Alvarez family. Merchants.  Traders.  There’s one sea captain,” he offered hopefully.  When Rosa didn’t evince any interest in this, he went on quickly, “They were quite successful.  They  may have, um, been involved in poppy sales to China.”  
  
“Wonderful,” Tía Gloria said.  
  
“Was there anything left?” Rosa asked.  
  
“Some things were recovered from the fire.” Peña reached back for a box. “Anything of real value was sent to museums. I have pictures. There was a burned harp and a burned piano.  They found a violin in the rubble that managed to avoid the flames.  A really valuable one.  And the church records said that Señora Alvarez frequently sang the solos.”  
  
Rosa nodded.  
  
Peña opened the box.  “There were a few things the museums left to us.  A fan. A silver hand mirror. Ivory combs for her hair.” He set out one of the combs, which was blackened in a few places and cracked.  
  
Rosa picked it up, imagined it tucking up some fabulous old hair style. “So they had… a lot of things.”  
  
“Yes. And some may not have been acquired by entirely fair means. Are you all right with that?”  
  
“I’ve read history.” Rosa set the comb down. “Is there any way to know who their niñera was? If this was our family, she saved us all.”  
  
Peña looked at her sadly. “Unfortunately, that sort of thing is lost to us forever. The records would have been in the house. The house burned. If she didn’t leave her name with someone—which would have been foolish if she faced off against armed rebels—then there isn’t a way to recover it. I’m sorry.”  
  
Rosa looked down.  
  
Tía Gloria reached over and took her hand. “According to the story, she had her own children. Probably grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They will remember her.”  
  
“But not what she did for us,” Rosa said.  
  
“We remember that. We just don’t know her name. They’ll remember her name, we’ll remember her deed.”  
  
Peña waited for a minute, then said. “Well, that was not the best answer for you, I suppose. But I do believe this is the right family for you. Everything seems to fit. Would you like a tour?  It really is lovely when the flowers are in bloom.”  
  


  



	4. The Gravedigger's Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt "something delving more into Enrique and Luisa's relationship?" for queen_bellatrix

  
The night before Día de Muertos, Luisa Saavedra stayed up, drinking strong (if increasingly cold) coffee in her bed behind the curtain. The lights were off, but Papá had a tendency to slip out of his room, the only other room in their house, and check on her. He might even hear her drinking the coffee, but it was her only chance. She didn’t dare use her alarm clock, since Papá had forbidden her to go to the cemetery before dawn.  
  
“Really, Luisa, some things are better left as a mystery,” he had said last night, as they’d walked home from church together.  
  
“But Papá, guitars don’t magically stay in tune.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“And I _saw_ you switching locks on the de la Cruz crypt.”  
  
“These things need to be done.”  
  
“Oh, come on… who is it? Who goes in there and tunes the guitar?”  
  
“No one you will guess. No one who wants to be known for it.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Luisa, you’re eighteen years old.  Stop begging like an infant.”  
  
And that was all he would say.  
  
She had always been a little curious about the de la Cruz guitar, which was taken out every year on Día de Muertos, strummed in Mariachi Plaza to prove it was still “miraculously” in tune, then returned to the tomb. But she had been willing to accept magic as the answer until yesterday afternoon, when she’d seen Papá take the big iron lock off the door and replace it with the lock he usually used on the church lawnmower, which was thirty years old and of no value to anyone. He also left the inner lock unlatched, offering no explanation for his actions.  
  
It _had_ to mean that someone was going to enter the crypt and tune the guitar. It was the only thing that made sense.  It wasn’t a miracle.  The sisters at school had always said that it was blasphemous to call it that, and, as usual, they were right.  But Papá was colluding with whoever it _was_ that made it happen.  
  
Luisa had gone to mass with him and seen everyone in town. One of them was the reality behind the magic.  But who?  There were dozens of mariachis who came to the plaza, of course. It could be any of them, except that they all seemed as reverential as anyone else during the strumming every year. Maybe it was the padre, who sometimes sang de la Cruz songs under his breath, and had once done a homily about music as a salve to the soul. (Señora Rivera, the shoemaker whose family was known to detest music and consider it a sin or something, had led the family out of church, except for her old mother, who let them all walk around her but did not budge.) There was the music teacher at school, and the choirmaster. Gezana, who ran things at the plaza… she would think of it as a way to get people in the mood for a show.  
  
But Papá wouldn’t even give a hint.  
  
Luisa decided to find out for herself.  Someday, when she took her vows at the convent, she would have to repent of her curiosity, which had gotten her into trouble more than once, but she wasn’t there yet.  For now, she could indulge it as much as she wanted… or as much as she could get away with.  
  
After Mass, she had gone to the cemetery to decorate her mother’s grave.  Luisa had never known her; she’d died bringing Luisa into the world.  But that didn’t matter.  Tomorrow, she and Papá would come and share the year’s stories with her.  Tonight, Luisa just wanted to clear away the dust that had blown over the stone since last week, and put out some wildflowers she’d  picked.  And then, she wanted to watch the people.  To see who was keeping an eye on the de la Cruz crypt.  
  
No one really stuck out, though there was a whole crowd there hanging ropes of fresh marigolds.  None of them noticed the different lock. She supposed no one other than Papá paid attention to the usual one.  He took it off for the tour guides, waited off to one side, and put it back when they were finished.  He’d taken this job particularly seriously since eBay started.  “There are nasty people in the world,” he’d told Luisa more than once, “and I don’t want them auctioning bones from my cemetery off to trinket collectors, to put up beside their dolls and posters.”  
  
She went back to the house just after sunset.  It was her turn to make supper.  Papá always split that with her, because he enjoyed cooking, but felt she should learn it as well.  They ate together, and didn’t talk about the de la Cruz guitar, instead veering, as they usually did at dinner, into what they were reading.  Papá was reading Sun Tzu. Luisa was re-reading the latest (and longest) of the _Harry Potter_ novels.  Papá encouraged re-reading, on the notion that something new appeared every time you started over. He was making noises about learning ancient Chinese to read Sun properly, but Luisa knew he wouldn’t.  Every time he found a new author, he talked about learning a new language, but he only really spoke the two he’d grown up with, much to his annoyance.  
  
They had talked about their books well into the evening, then he had retired to his room, and she had retreated behind her curtain.  She didn’t dare put on a lamp to keep reading, since he’d certainly know what she was really up to if he saw light through the cloth.  
  
But sitting in bed, drinking cold coffee, was a boring thing to do, and seemed to take much longer than the entire previous day had. Finally, she heard Papá start to snore. She picked up her bag, which had her sewing and her book in it, and slid carefully from her bed, pushing the curtain aside as quietly as she could and closing it behind her, hiding her nook off from the kitchen and living room. Her bed was right beside the stove, so it could keep her warm during cold nights, and Papá had especially painted her corner and built her a pretty bed, and put up a rod for her clothes at its foot. The rod was laden down with clothes she’d been making, but only a few were hers. She had been taking in sewing for other people this year, and a lot of what was taking up her space was for them. She wanted to use some of what she was saving to build onto the house, but Papá told her that she should save it for herself. Someday, he said, she would want to make a wedding dress.  
  
He didn’t believe her about wanting to be a nun.  
  
She tiptoed quietly through the kitchen and pushed the door open. It squeaked a little bit and she froze, but then Papá snored again, and she guessed it was all right.  
  
She slipped out into the moonlit night, hopped over the low wall, and went back into the cemetery.  
  
Some of the graves were already decorated for tomorrow night; others still looked naked. Their families would be in tomorrow. For those whose families didn’t come, Luisa and Papá would put out what flowers they could gather. She walked the narrow paths between the graves, enjoying the place, as she always did. There were probably ghosts, but she wasn’t afraid of them. She passed Mamá’s grave and tossed a kiss, and she passed stones for the Chavez family and the Torres family and dozens of others. There were a million Riveras in town, because so many orphans had been given the name, and most of the families weren’t related to each other. She passed a fairly nice stone for Imelda Rivera Reyes. Around it were markers for what seemed to be her brothers, and a couple of Hernandez stones—Julio and Rosa and Victoria. They must have married in.  
  
Beyond that were the small de la Cruz graves… the parents. These were decorated by the town for the tourists, but there wasn’t much to be done. Ernesto de la Cruz had said that his parents valued their privacy, and so he had bought them only small stones in an out-of-the-way plot. She passed the monument to the revolutionaries from Santa Cecilia whose bodies had not been returned, and the row of graves of the sisters (these, she genuflected to). At the end of this row was a bench behind a hedgerow that grew beside the huge mausoleum dedicated to Ernesto de la Cruz. Tomorrow, someone would set up a sound system here, to entertain the tourists who came to the grave. It was a conveniently hidden spot, and Luisa chose it for her own hiding space. The closest grave was for a nun called Teresa la Perdida. It was a strange name, and Luisa wondered how she’d gotten it.  
  
She meant to stay awake for the rest of the night.  
  
Really.  
  
But she drifted off, staring at the stone, and fell into a light dream about nuns, all of whom seemed to be laughing at her fondly when she tried to join them. She was getting quite cross when one of them said, “Quique, be still, mijo. It’s fine.”  
  
Luisa blinked herself awake, and was almost surprised to find herself here. The hedges still hid her, but now she could clearly hear the voices on the other side. The sky was the deep blue of the hour before sunrise.  
  
“I can get it, Mamá Coco,” a soft, male voice said. “You don’t need to fuss.”  
  
There was a pause, then the first voice came again—an old woman’s voice. “All right. You try. I was used to the old lock.”  
  
“I think this one is supposed to be easier,” the man said. “The one last year was bigger. And still not the one that’s usually here.”  
  
Luisa smiled, wondering which lock Papá had been putting on in earlier years. Maybe the one from the shed, which had gotten damaged when the shed burned down.  
  
She slipped down from the bench and crept as quietly as she could to the end of the hedge. She was almost on top of the mausoleum now, and there was enough moonlight to see both of the newcomers clearly.  
  
They were the last people she would expect at the de la Cruz tomb. The woman was Señora Rivera’s mother. The boy—man, she guessed; he seemed to be much older than she was—was one of the grandsons. She didn’t know his name, but he was tall and thin, with wonderful thick black hair, and a fine face, like something in a painting or maybe from a movie. He wouldn’t be playing an action hero or driving a fast car in the movie. He would maybe be the handsome new teacher at an old school who inspired the students to do better. Or the artist who was trying to sculpt a masterpiece, or the gentle doctor who would save the heroine’s life.  
  
Luisa had never thought a man to be beautiful before, not in the real world, but this man was, at least to her eyes. She also loved the way he carefully guided his grandmother to a bench and kissed her head while he took her hairpin and started fiddling with the lock.  
  
She heard the lock give way and the chain rattle through its hooks, and a moment later, the tomb door opened, and the two of them went inside.  
  
Luisa hopped up onto the stairs and peeked. The man took the guitar from its pegs and handed it reverently to his grandmother, who held it on her knee, almost hugging it.  
  
“Mamá Coco,” he said, “someday, you’ll tell me why.”  
  
“I’ve told you, Quique. Because this guitar should never be fully silent.”  
  
“But why do you care?”  
  
The woman, Mamá Coco, didn’t answer. She just strummed the guitar which was as out of tune as any other guitar that had lain dormant for a year.  
  
“My tuning fork?” she asked, and Quique produced it from his pocket. Mamá Coco rang it against the stone and listened, then began the slow process of tuning the old guitar. She did it with great love and gentleness, and when she was done, it was perfect again.  
  
“There,” Quique said. “Another year. Another miracle.”  
  
“Right. Miracles.” Mamá Coco cradled the guitar again, then handed it back to her grandson. “We make our own miracles, mijo. Every year. Don’t tell your mother I said that.”  
  
He put the guitar back on its pegs.  “Where would I even start to tell her that? I’d have to tell her that—“  
  
He stopped talking, and that was when Luisa realized that they had been moving out of the crypt, and she, fascinated by her eavesdropping, was standing fully in the open.  
  
She stared at him. He was definitely older than she was, but she didn’t know how much. His eyes were deep and kind and his hands, still raised from opening the door, were fine and a bit worn from the work he must do in the shoe workshop. He was growing a mustache, but it had the strange effect of making him look like he was a younger man who was trying to _look_ like an older man and—  
  
“Who are you?” he asked.  
  
She tried to answer, but nothing came out.  
  
“She’s the sexton’s daughter,” Mamá Coco said. “It’s all right. At least I think it is. Isidro knows, doesn’t he?”  
  
Luisa nodded. “I wanted to see…” She looked over and saw the row of nuns’ graves beyond the hedge, and heard them laughing in her dream. “My name is Luisa,” she blurted, and ran.  
  
She got as far as the older de la Cruz graves, then looked back. Quique had followed her partway out, and was looking at her, bewildered. Mamá Coco was still at the top of the steps, smiling.  
  
Luisa ran for home, not entirely sure why her heart had started to triphammer in her chest.  Getting caught so suddenly.  That had to be it.  
  
Papá was already up when she ran inside, but instead of being angry, he just rolled his eyes and told her to get some sleep.  She didn’t. She got dressed for the day and went to the plaza, where Gezana took the de la Cruz guitar out and gave it to the winner of yesterday’s lottery to strum.  It was, as always, declared to be perfectly in tune.  He was allowed to play a short song on it.  
  
Luisa scanned the crowd for her early morning friends, but of course they weren’t there. The Rivera family never came to Mariachi Plaza.  They hated music.  Everyone knew it.  
  
But now Luisa knew other things.  
  
She began to haunt the shoe shop.  She could never afford new shoes from them.  It would take more sewing than she had time to take in. But they were always reasonable, even generous, on repairs, and she brought her poor old chanclas in three times over the next two months, wanting to have a look around.  Their family workshop was warm and full of talk. The old woman, who Luisa was also calling Mamá Coco by her third visit, was a font of stories.  Her daughter (Quique’s mother) taught Luisa how to make her own simple shoe repairs, though she would need a stronger needle.  (“And you should save for better shoes.  It will cost less in the end.”)  Quique’s brother and his wife had a three year old boy who was always underfoot, and on her second and third visits, Luisa was enlisted to “distract” him while Berto tightened buckles and stitched seams, as Carmen had orders to finish. There was also a sister, Gloria, who was the youngest (other than baby Abel), and she wore cute clothes and fabulous make-up that Luisa didn’t think she’d ever quite dare to try.  
  
Quique kept a close eye on her, but rarely talked to her in the shop, except to tell her that her shoes were ready.  In town, he seemed to hover near the house, saying hello to Papá every day, nodding to Luisa and smiling.  He seemed to be expecting her to mention something about the de la Cruz crypt, but she didn’t do it.  She knew a secret when she saw one.  
  
After her third visit to the shop, she knew she couldn’t make up any more reasons to have her shoes repaired.  It would be insulting to suggest that their repairs didn’t hold.  She toyed with the idea of asking if she could apprentice to them—it really was interesting work, now that she’d seen it up close—but she’d never heard of them taking in anyone from outside the family.  And of course, if she were ever forced to be honest, she would have to admit that shoes were a secondary interest.  Maybe even tertiary.  Her first interest was why this music-hating family was keeping the guitar in tune.  Her second (and her face went hot when she admitted it to herself) was in knowing if Enrique—the more she knew him, the more it seemed he should have the honor of a full name instead of a nickname—was involved with anyone, or if he would ever consider a girl who wouldn’t be nineteen until June.  So far, she had no real idea on this.  
  
But the shoes were a solid third.  
  
Still, they might not believe it.  
  
Maybe she could offer to look after Abel while Berto and Carmen worked, sort of a neighborly niñera.  It would be a good, respectable job.  Not that she had any experience, or had ever thought about getting experience.  She was going to the convent, after all.  
  
Except that she almost never thought about that anymore.  
  
She sat on her bed and took off her shoes, scanning them for even the smallest flaw.  Unfortunately, Berto’s work was thorough.  Maybe Papá’s boots could use some shoring up.  Maybe she could try and not do it right, and then she could ask Señora Rivera if she could help, and…  
  
There was a knock at the door.  
  
Luisa frowned.  Papá was at the church, trimming the bushes.  
  
She pushed aside her curtain and got up, pulling a shawl over her shoulders to cover the fact that she’d been getting comfortable for the evening.  She opened the door.  
  
Mamá Coco was there, carrying a woven bag. Her braids gleamed in the sunset, and she smiled warmly.  “Ah, Luisa,” she said.  “It’s good to see you, dear.  You haven’t been by the shop in a week.”  
  
“I…” She bit her lip. “My shoes aren’t broken.”  
  
“Oh, but you’ve only had three of them fixed.  You should have at least one more.”  She smiled again. “May I come in? I actually want to hire you.”  
  
“Hire me?”  
  
“I understand that you sew.”  
  
“Oh. Right. Yes.”  
  
“I used to be quite good but…” She shrugged and held up her hands.  The fingers were twisted with arthritis.  “Anyway, my grandson’s thirtieth birthday is coming. I wanted to get him a new jacket, with some embroidery on it.  I drew the design.  But even drawing it.  Eh.” She shrugged again, then pulled a piece of paper from her bag with a rich design on it… showing a lock and a key.  She winked.  “What do you say? I have his measurements and the cloth, and I was thinking of doing the design on the cuffs, because of our little secret.”  
  
“Right.  I… sure.”  
  
“I appreciate you not sharing it, by the way.”  
  
“I guessed it was a secret.”  
  
Mamá Coco didn’t say anything, just arched her eyebrows, like she was waiting for Luisa to ask her why.  But Luisa supposed that if she hadn’t told her own grandson, she probably wasn’t going to tell the sexton’s daughter.  After a minute, the older woman nodded and smiled.  “I do like you.  I always liked your father, too.  My girl, Victoria”—she closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to them briefly, and Luisa remembered that one of her children had died—“used to go up to San Pedro to teach lessons every month.  I would go with her. Isidro always had so many questions.  Victoria arranged for him to come down to the town for school. Did you know that?”  
  
“I knew he’d been helped.  I didn’t know that she was your daughter.”  
  
“I haven’t been up to the mountains for many years.”  She sighed, then smiled.  “Do you think you can do that sewing job?”  
  
“Yes, I can do that.”  
  
“Good. I’ll pay you whatever you think is fair. Just bring it by when you’ve finished.  In a closed box, of course.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“And if you have trouble, and you may, you may always come visit to ask questions.  Stay for dinner.”  
  
“Wouldn’t people wonder why I was there?”  
  
She smiled.  “Child, no one is left wondering about that.”  
  
Luisa blushed and put her hand over her mouth.  
  
Mamá Coco winked.  “I’m on your side.  Shh.  Don’t tell.”  
  
“But everyone knows?”  
  
“Oh, maybe not everyone.  My Quique may well need to be kicked in the head by a horse to get it through his skull.  And if it does make it through, he’ll promptly declare you too young.”  
  
“Am I?”  
  
“You’re twelve years younger than he is. I was ten years younger than Julio.  It’s not that much more.” She shrugged.  “There are worse things in the world.  But do you think you’re too young?  Do you mean to go away to college?”  
  
“No.  I was going to be a nun.”  
  
She nodded.  “I note the past tense already.”  
  
“Oh, well… I…”  
  
Mamá Coco laughed merrily.  “Don’t worry, Luisa.  I’m making no decisions for you, or for Quique.  But if you need an ally, look no further.” She smiled, nodded, and left the house.  
  
Luisa stood in the doorway for a moment longer, waiting for her heart to stop racing.  It didn’t.  She sat down to her sewing despite it.  



	5. Gemela

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt "How about the first performance of Frida and Hector's play, and the critical response to it?" for princesselwen (This didn't go exactly as asked and it's short, but hey, it has graphics. ;p)

| 

# _Gemela (musical)_

****

**_Gemela_** is a musical by Héctor Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Rivera wrote the music and lyrics, with additional lyrics credited to his brother-in-law, Oscar Rivera. Kahlo wrote the book and designed the major set pieces. 

Dealing with the question of mixed marriage afterlives, _Gemela_ caused both conversation and controversy upon its opening. The play tells the story of a pair of twins from Oaxaca, Arturo and Timoteo, who, during their time in the living world, traveled to Scandinavia, where Timoteo married the lovely Inga. Inga’s own twin, Astrid, objected to the marriage, as did Arturo. Picking up a century after their deaths, Inga and Astrid are in the Scandinavian Valhalla, young and beautiful, nearly human, awaiting the grand battle of Ragnarok, though Inga is not particularly interested in it. When she discovers a passage to Mictlan, she chooses to go to her beloved Timoteo. Astrid, determined to bring her back to “where she belongs,” follows. They meet with the brothers again, and try to find a way to reconcile their wildly different cultures. 

Although both developers have moved on to other projects, the show continues essentially as first performed, ten years after its debut. 

## Development

The story, developed by Rivera and Kahlo after a philosophical discussion of differing afterlife traditions in the real world, began with the idea of twins, largely, according to Rivera, because the conversation had begun with jokes his brothers-in-law (twins Oscar and Felipe Rivera) had been making. This initially humorous idea became the show’s major symbolic form, with the twinning of afterlives, the mirrored couples, and twinned loves of one’s beloved and one’s culture. 

The play was developed against the backdrop of Rivera’s increasing fame after the revelation that the famed Ernesto de la Cruz was responsible for his death. With interest high, there was no difficulty finding production space and support for an original play, although Rivera had no previous experience in the form. His longstanding relations in the art district had kept him in touch with Kahlo, who assisted his family in the [Día de Muertos Incident](https://www.amazon.com/Coco-Theatrical-Version-Anthony-Gonzalez/dp/B0779FK899/ref=sr_1_3?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1538949581&sr=1-3&keywords=coco&dpID=61QkF5NoslL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch) the previous year. 

Because the Scandinavian view of the afterlife—largely influenced by the tales of the Vikings, though, like our own world, suffused with later religious input—is not the one we inhabit, and the people of that world are fully fleshed and often surrounded with living vegetation, the construction of that world necessitated many artistic innovations by Kahlo. “The flesh was the most obvious difference,” she said. “We went through many trials before coming up with anything that would work.” Working with recently arrived law enforcement officers, who had done reconstructive work with clay in the living world, she developed a movable foam framework, which would respond to the actors’ movements. “I’m still not satisfied with it,” she said. “Though I imagine they would have even greater trouble in Valhalla imitating _our_ forms!” 

## Synopsis

**_Act I_**  
The show opens in the inventors’ workshop where Timoteo and his brother Arturo are working on a flying machine. When they are together, they refer to it as nothing but a game, but when Arturo leaves, Timoteo reveals his wish to see his wife from the living world, Inga, who remained in Sweden after he himself died in the fighting during the Revolution, and who he believes might have re-married (“If I Could Fly Beyond The Sea”). On the wall, he has a painting she once made, left on an ofrenda by an unknown person. It shows a twinflower, the national symbol of Sweden. 

The painting swings, and as it does so, the stage revolves, bringing the action to Valhalla, where Inga is painting again. She and her sister, Astrid, are waiting for Ragnarok, where Astrid plans to die her final death in heroic battle (“Thunder and Fire”). Inga is bored with the subject, and distressed that she has not been able to find Timeoteo. Astrid, who was not a great fan of Inga’s marriage, suggests that he went to a different afterlife, having heard a somewhat dark and mangled version of Mexican traditions (“Bones”). Inga, who had not been a believer in life and had considered both versions to be superstition, considers the possibility (“If I Could Fly Beyond the Sea (Reprise 1)”). She removes the painting from her easel, revealing a marigold, and places it in the same position that the twinflower occupied in Timoteo’s workshop, and immediately the workshop is flooded with light. She is reaching for it when Astrid returns and sees her. They argue (“I Had A Life”/”Gunnarsdottir”), and Inga jumps through the portal astride her flying horse, Skirnir. Astrid, fuming, follows her. 

They land in the city, where Inga and Timoteo are reunited in a joyful song (“Mi Vida”/”Mitt Allt”), while Astrid, noticing the closed portal and realizing that they are now in skeletal form (and Skirnir has become a flying alebrije), sings a furious counterpoint (“Far From Home”). Arturo returns to discover this and adds his own voice, in his anger at his brother, both about the marriage and about Inga’s decision to stay in Sweden with their daughter (“Are We Not Good Enough For You?”). The songs, mixing Mexican and Scandinavian melodies, end in a furious crash of thunder, as Inga and Timeteo embrace, and Astrid and Arturo stalk off. 

The remainder of Act I consists of the efforts of Inga and Timoteo to create a life, including a long overdue talk about what happened after his death, and why she never went to his family after learning that he had died, and never took their daughter to visit until she was sixteen, and laid the painting of the twinflower on the ofrenda, but felt the family’s hostility over her choice not to move in with them (“We Were Strangers”). Timoteo reminds her that he had not exactly been welcomed with open arms by her family, either (“Salt of the Earth, We’re Sure”). But they never stopped loving one another, and vow to make it work. Meanwhile, Arturo and Astrid plan to re-open the portal and separate their siblings (“They Don’t Belong”), but as they work together, they realize that they’re an effective team (“Amigas Locas”). With each arguing the superiority of their native afterlives (“Flesh and Bones”), they begin to fall in love. They have just given in to their feelings and joined in a passionate kiss when the portal opens up again (“Bridges”), pulling them to Valhalla and closing Act I. 

**_Act II_**  
Act II largely concerns the efforts of the two couples to bring everyone back where they belong and find a way to cope with the cultural differences. 

Opening one month later, Astrid and Arturo have been enjoying the pleasures of being fully fleshed (“Clean Water, Fresh Air… And the Other Thing”), but Arturo is not given a place in the coming battle of Ragnarok, and Astrid misses the food of Mictlan. At home, Inga, while happy to be with Timoteo, misses the lush green landscape of Valhalla, and riding Skirnir over flowered meadows (“Twinflowers”). She believes she’s lost her place in the final battle. Timoteo, wanting her to be happy, builds a dragon-headed ship for her (“If I Could Fly Beyond the Sea (Reprise 2)”). She wants him to be happy as well, and uses her skill at painting to re-create the scenery from his hacienda in Mexico. But they are both worried about their siblings, and know they need to find a way to create a permanent bridge, so they can come and go at will. There is no known way to do this, and they go to various experts in the city, including a priest who merely comforts them (“Have Faith, My Children”), a journalist who is inordinately interested in their story (“Tell Me Everything”), and an official from the Department of Family Reunions who is mainly concerned with sending Inga back to Valhalla (“Where You Belong”). 

Finally, Timoteo realizes that this can only work the way everything in Mictlan works—by the intervention of the living. They resolve to use Día de Muertos to connect to their great-great-grandchildren, who have long since scattered around the world (“Dear God, Where Are They Now?”). At the library, they find thirty descendants, but most of them are beyond easy reach, living in places with no formal mode of connection. They’re about to give up when they find a single boy, spending a year in Mexico with no knowledge of his own heritage there, much to Timoteo’s grief (“One-Sixteenth”). He does, however, have a picture of Inga that he has placed on his host family’s ofrenda, and, with Timoteo’s guidance, she crosses the bridge and makes contact with the boy. 

In Valhalla, Arturo and Astrid are bickering again, and trying to re-create the portal, but Inga’s painting is no longer there, and they can’t think of anything shared between the worlds (“We Were Strangers (Reprise)”). Arturo admits that he knows how to use the magic of Mictlan to find the way home. In fact, when he’s alone, he’s been able to find a marigold bridge in the sky. But since he can’t find it with Astrid, he refuses to cross it. She tells him that she won’t be the one holding him hostage. 

But as they start to argue about who will sacrifice what for whom, the portal open again and Inga flies through on Skirnir, their forms changing as they pass through (an effect designed by Kahlo). She says they need marigolds, which grow live in Valhalla, and they need them before sunrise. Timoteo is holding the portal with only the power of their great-great-grandson’s dream. Together, the other three rush out to the fields to get the flowers (“Gathering the Sunrise”), and, just as the sun is about to rise, cast the petals through the portal, where they form a permanent bridge, allowing them to pass back and forth between their workshops (“Bridges (Reprise)”/”Finale”). 

## Response

Critical response was positive in initial showings, with particular praise for Rivera’s music, which was called “a nuanced fusion of disparate sources” and “an aural metaphor.” The performances, particularly Cristoval Rodriguez as Arturo, were universally praised. Some critics complained that the story was an oversimplification, and Esme Flores, a longtime fan of Ernesto de la Cruz who continues to cast doubt on Rivera’s story, declared it “an insult to our world.” 

Audiences immediately took to the story, many having lost relatives to modern mobility. Members of culturally mixed couples first wistfully wished for such an easy solution, then began looking for it, leading ultimately to the new Travel Division at the Department of Family Reunions, founded by Himari Hasegawa de Perez, who was able to connect with her brother in Tokoyo. The Division has not been able to adequately explain the process of travel, only that it is “not difficult” and does not, unfortunately, consist of a marigold bridge and a portal, but Hasegawa certainly credits her interest in solving the problem to her repeated viewings of _Gemela_. “I’d just given up,” she said. “I thought I had sundered my ties to my homeland. But now, we have everything.” 

| 

Music and Lyrics: Héctor Rivera  
Book: Frida Kahlo   
  
---|---|---


	6. Hacendados

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt "Carlos and Tina and their baby and Denny" for Karen

  
“You can move in here,” Carlos suggested out of nowhere.  
  
Or at least, Denny supposed, he was supposed to think it was out of nowhere, but he knew better.  Carlos and Tina didn’t have a lot of time to spend cleaning up the second floor of their garage.  Tina was working on a big trial, and Carlos was defending his thesis next weekend.  And yet, he had mentioned the press camping outside of his little apartment in Tepito, and the next thing he knew, they asked him to come over and help them clean it out and take all of their accumulated junk to the dump.  As soon as he’d noticed that there was a kitchenette and a bathroom up here, he’d known this was coming.  
  
“I can’t—”  he started.  
  
But Carlos pretended not to hear him, gesturing around the little flat.  “It’ll save you some money on that rat trap you call an apartment. We’ll knock out a street side door and make it your office. And Gabi will stay in your office while Tina and I are at work.”  
  
“Unless I have to go tail a violent criminal who’s been stalking his girlfriend.”  
  
“We’ll get you one of those backpack baby carriers, and buy Gabi one of those little lady-sized guns that your mother hates.” He grinned and picked the baby up, nuzzling her belly until she giggled.  
  
Tina rolled her eyes and took her back. “Honestly, Papá. We aren’t arming our five-week-old child.”  
  
“It’s never too early to teach her to defend herself against the evildoers of the world!” Carlos made a grand gesture with his arms, finishing up with his hands on his hips. “She’ll be a superhero. With great dirty diapers comes great stinkiness!”  
  
“No gun, though,” Denny said. “Superheroes all have some signature thing. Maybe she can have the guitar string of truth!”  
  
“I like it.” Carlos reached over and tickled under Gabi’s chin, then under Tina’s. “And the law books of justice!” He thought about it. “Well, actually, that’s sort of what regular law books are. What shall she have, Tina?”  
  
“A gavel, of course, to bop criminals over the head with. Why stop with lawyer things? She’ll be a judge superhero. With magical music skills. To solve crimes.” She grinned over at Denny.  
  
“Well, yes, of course. She’ll need _something_ from her godfather. Won’t you? Yes, you will.” He kissed the top of Gabi’s fuzzy little head (she was clearly going to get Carlos’s thick black hair). “As to the garage… Carlos, I can’t afford this neighborhood.”  
  
“Well, neither can we,” Carlos said.  “So it’s perfect.”  
  
“My grandparents gave me the house,” Tina reminded him.  “They wanted to live on their boat.  The mortgage is paid, and we just pay taxes now.  You go in as a third of that.  It’s probably cheaper than the rat trap.”  
  
Denny looked around. “Maybe… maybe on the apartment. I should pay rent, though. Your grandparents didn’t give _me_ a house.  But I better keep my office where it is. I need to meet people somewhere that looks professional.”  
  
“Yes,” Carlos said dryly. “The plastic lawn chairs and the card table give you a certain authority.”  
  
“Enrique gave me a bonus. I’m using it for proper furniture. As soon as I get time to shop. The clients have been pretty non-stop since the Rivera case, and the thing with Jaramillo…”  
  
“It’s the Jaramillo thing that’s the problem,” Tina said.  “The press is going to keep staking out that office—”  
  
“And you’d rather have them staking out your home?”  
  
Carlos shrugged elaborately. “They’ve been hunting me since the book came out.  But they can’t blend in around here.  What are they going to do, camp out in the Perez’s driveway?  Julia would come out with a gun if they  tried.”  
  
Denny shook his head.  “I can  handle them at the office.  And it’s not just the press.  Do you really want Piluca’s boyfriend finding me listed here?”  
  
Carlos and Tina looked at each other, and Denny could see that this, at least, had sunk in.  He’d barely finished riding the wave of publicity over Héctor Rivera when Piluca Jaramillo, an up and coming opera singer from the conservatory, had come to him (on Carlos’s recommendation) to stop her boyfriend from stalking her. Things had escalated.  Carlos had caught him trying to break into Piluca’s apartment, and it had ended up in a motorcycle race across town, which had finally ended in Constitution Square, where Denny had tacked the bastard to the ground, relieved him of the giant butcher knife he’d been carrying, and cuffed him in front of about five hundred tourists.  It hadn’t taken the news crews too long to realize that they already knew him. The police hadn’t even pressed him too hard about having the cuffs. (In fact, they were trying to get him to take a regular job.) The publicity had kept people coming, a lot of them young women who seemed to think he was some kind of modern day knight.  He didn’t mind the work.  It was satisfying to chase down living bastards before they did their damage, though every time he managed it, he thought of the fact that no one had managed it in time for Héctor Rivera.  
  
Or for his own grandfather, though that had been the kind of spur of the moment crime that no one really could have stopped, no matter what the talking heads said.  
  
He shook his head  sharply. “Anyway, I don’t have time for furniture shopping at the moment.”  
  
“You had time to be here today,” Tina pointed out.  
  
“I don’t sacrifice baby-time for furniture.”  
  
Carlos laughed. “We could go online. Order things and have them delivered.  You could be tickling Gabi the whole time. It’s a radical new idea.”  
  
Denny sighed and looked around the garage. It was possibly a few square feet bigger than the studio he lived in now. There was a little kitchenette, and it was cable ready. He could stay up as late as he needed to working on cases without worrying about waking the baby. “What would you say for rent?”  
  
“We already said for rent, and that’s non-negotiable,” Tina said, sitting down in the little window seat. “We all save money, then buy the place next door. Then the one next to that. And we get our own little hacienda to raise generations of little crime-solving musical judges in.  Of course, we’ll need to find Denny a wife, or the generations will run out too quickly.”  
  
“You’re planning my wife and children?”  
  
“Call it advanced family planning.”  
  
“That’s not what that phrase means.”  
  
“I like my version better.”  
  
“I think you’re scaring him,” Carlos said.  
  
“Fine. Well, if we can’t get Denny married off, I’ll find another woman friend to move in anyway.  I feel outnumbered.  And I don’t feel like waiting for Gabi to grow up before we get our hacienda going. I’m jealous now. I liked staying down there and having a dozen people running around the household.  I don’t blame Miguel for wanting to stay.”  
  
“Neither do I,” Denny said, and shrugged.  “I don’t know.  It just feels normal to be in a big house.   It was mostly Mamá and me when I was little—even before Papá died, he was away a lot—but it always felt wrong.  I want a full ofrenda.”  
  
Carlos made a face.  “Ofrendas are for dead people. Who do you want to die?”  
  
“We already have our people. It’s just that none of us have very _many_ people.  I mean, my ofrenda is my father and grandfather.  And I didn’t even know my grandfather.”  
  
“So if we put them all together, it’s a party.” Tina grinned.  “I see your point.”  
  
“I’d still rather have a full dinner table,” Carlos muttered.  
  
“We can have, that, too.”  
  
“But I’m with the thought of having a full house.  I still like the idea of having the business here.  I mean, I can take my private students here, and Denny could have an office, and you could have a private law office and stop keeping criminals out of jail.”  
  
“I like what I do.  Or at least I think it needs to be done.”  Tina shook her shoulders briskly, like she was trying to shake off a load she’d been carrying.  “But I do kind of like the idea of working from our own hacienda.  Maybe we’ll put up a giant gavel over the attic.”  
  
“Or a magnifying glass,” Denny suggested.  
  
“We’ll make them criss-cross,” Carlos said.  “And Gabby and I will sneak up behind them to play our guitars.”  
  
“No, we need to think about something else to forbid for a few generations,” Tina said.  “We wouldn’t want to _copy_ the Riveras, after all.  I say we ban high heels.  No one will be allowed to wear high heels, because I sprained my ankle last spring.”  
  
“You’re going to give back the ones Enrique gave you?”  
  
She made a horrified face.  “God forbid.  No.  Never that.  Those things are more comfortable than sneakers.   It’ll have to be hats.”  
  
“I play in a mariachi band during the summer, mi vida.”  
  
“Well, what _can_ we prohibit so our great-great-grandchildren can rebel against it?”  
  
“Speaking English?” Denny proposed.  
  
“A hundred years from now, maybe everyone will want to speak Chinese instead.”  
  
Carlos sighed.  “It’s hard to think of something to ban.  How did the Riveras ever make that work?”  
  
“They didn’t,” Tina pointed out.  “In case you didn’t notice your own student.  Or  his cousin, who picked up the violin suspiciously fast, in my opinion.”  
  
“A year is enough to learn the basics,” Carlos said.  “Really, it is.”  
  
“If you have experience with some kind of music first.”  Tina shook her head.  “Honestly, cariño, we met in the orchestra.  I’m not a complete stranger to the music world.”  
  
“I am,” Denny offered.  
  
“Not anymore, you’re not.”  Carlos sat down on the floor under a slanted window.  “We’ll have you speaking music as well as anyone in a month of living here.  We’ll teach you to sing.”  
  
“And we’re back to me living here.”  
  
“I thought we’d settled that.  We’re building a hacienda here.”  
  
“We’re all going to have to step up the income to do that in this neighborhood. Or anywhere else in this city. We could move somewhere cheaper.”  
  
“Well, I teach at the conservatory,” Carlos reminded him. “There’s only so far away from it that I can be. So, I guess we’ll have to bring in more money. My book’s still doing all right. There’s even someone who wants to make a movie, though I don’t think the Riveras will go for that. My agent wants another one. Who should I put in the dock next? There’s nobody else who stinks as much as de la Cruz always did to me.”  
  
“You could write a perfectly happy book next,” Tina suggested. “Someone who turns out to be much better than people thought, instead of much worse.”  
  
“No one buys those.”  
  
Denny thought about it. “How about a book about how good guitars are for children?” He shrugged. “I mean, there’s research and everything, so it could be something you’d write for your regular job.”  
  
“Maybe. Hmm. Or a children’s book.” Carlos leaned against the stove. The roof slanted down, and he had to duck a little. “That could be fun. But I think my agent wants another big true musical crime book. Maybe I’ll hire you if I find another crime.”  
  
“Nah, that would just be fun work. We could just be a team again.”  
  
“Then that’s the plan. I’ll just find someone in the music business who’s corrupt.”  
  
“Wherever will you look?” Tina asked dryly.  
  
He sighed. “I wish that weren’t sarcastic. But do you know how many people have already applied for legal help from the Rivera Institute? Sixty-three. It’s been in place for six months. That’s more than ten people a month, if you’re math-impaired. And most of them have legitimate contract issues. Two have good cases for plagiarism.”  
  
“Only two?” Denny asked.  
  
Carlos shrugged. “Well, about half of the ones in lousy contracts _also_ think that some popular singer has plagiarized them, but for the most part, we’re talking about, at best, surface similarities that are more easily explained as coincidental family resemblance. They’re kind of crushed about that. But there’s enough real work to do protecting them from real problems without encouraging paranoia.”  
  
“That’s… practical.”  
  
“For a musician?”  
  
“Well…”  
  
Tina shook her head. “My husband has an unconscionably realistic side, for an artist. And here I thought I was marrying an irresponsible, flighty musician. It’s a perfectly good stereotype he’s breaking.”  
  
“I’ll try to be more wasteful and flighty in the future. After we’ve bought up the whole block to turn it into a modern hacienda.”  
  
“Sounds like a plan,” Tina said. “Now, her royal highness needs her lunch, so I will leave you two hacendados to sort out Denny’s living arrangements…”  



	7. Spells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt, "how about further exploration of Odiados" for FFR

Ernesto had never paid much attention to the weather in the land of the dead.  It had no real substance.  There was no water cycle, no wind. It was pleasantly warm, neither humid nor dry. It was, in essence, always a perfect late fall day.  
  
Well, late fall in climates north of the one where Ernesto had grown up. If there had been one blessing in dying young, it was that he’d never had to endure another hot day in Oaxaca.  Or anything else in Oaxaca.  The only thing it had been good for once he’d left—other than the idiots putting up statues—had been as a sure-fire conversation starter at parties.  “Oh, you should see the things they do in Santa Cecilia…”  In his closed parties, he had developed a whole cast of characters to entertain his guests with.  There had been a priest too stupid to get a parish where he’d be expected to read.  A slattern with the morals of a cat in heat.  A superstitious bum who had a good luck charm for every occasion (and who refused to see that he had not benefited from any of them).  And of course, the wailing women with a dozen children each.  And the shrew.  He did a very good impression of the shrew.  All of them lived in a steaming outdoor oven full of offal.  
  
The universe seemed to have a peculiar sense of humor.  
  
The land of the Odiados had weather that made Oaxaca look comfortable. It was hot and sticky and always looked like the last moment before a huge storm that would never come.  There was a kind of greenish light everywhere.  It was filled with the rankest superstitions Ernesto had ever encountered, and populated by people who made his parents and their neighbors seem like the height of sophisticated intellect.  
  
He was Ernesto de la Cruz.  He did not belong here.  
  
But he had tried every rational means to get out. He’d spoken to the judges when they’d come to hear a case about one drug pusher stealing the bones of another, and they had said they had no power over where the land let people wander.  He’d carefully mapped the streets, looking for any point of egress.  The center of the neighborhood was clear enough.  Like anywhere else, there was a plaza (Ernesto had not lowered himself so far as to sing there, but it was the only place to find certain necessities).  Beyond the plaza were blocks of living quarters, businesses—the things one would expect to find.  There were places he’d learned to avoid, like the yellow house and mad old Tadeo, who lived there among its shrieks.  He had carefully drawn it all out, and the center never changed.    
  
But no matter what side streets he took, and he kept meticulous track of them, he ended up on a narrow, garbage-choked path called Calle Torcida.  He could see different parts of the real city when he looked up. He even once caught a glimpse of the train yard Héctor had used to send him here.  But no matter what direction he turned on Calle Torcida, no matter where it looked like it should lead, he ended up heading back toward the plaza.  
  
He’d tried other things as well.  He’d acquired a telescope in one of the market stalls so he could see beyond the limits of the neighborhood, and he’d tried to throw a rock from the highest building he could find near Calle Torcida. The rock had sailed easily over the street, and Ernesto was settling down to figure out how he might get airborne himself when he’d heard something clattering. The rock came down on the roof beside him, coming to rest beside his boot.  
  
That was when magic had started to seem like a reasonable course of action.  If no rational explanation could cover the movement of that rock, then it was only rational to embrace the irrational, at least here.  
  
“There’s no shortage of black magic around here.” His neighbor, a general named Acosta, gave a disdainful sniff.  “Anyone who’s not here for murder or bad politics is here for witchcraft.  Usually accompanied by murder.  I half thought you might have been trying some black magic yourself.   Sacrifice your friend for a music career?”  
  
“Please.” Ernesto looked around.  “I don’t know anything about these superstitious types.  I don’t want to waste my time with madmen like Tadeo.  Is anyone any good?”  
  
Acosta shrugged.  “If they were any good, they’d have gotten out of here themselves, wouldn’t they?”  
  
“Well, they may be here because of what they did.”  
  
“As opposed to you?” Acosta gave a snort of laughter.  “My friend, you’re as hated as anyone else here.  Maybe more, because they think you betrayed them.  Hell hath no fury like movie fans scorned.”  
  
Ernesto brushed this away impatiently.  “I mean, these are men who killed for the pleasure of it.  I never did that.  I’m not a lunatic.  I’m an artist.”  
  
“Really.”  
  
“Of course, really.  If I killed for pleasure, there’d be a string of bodies.  I could have killed prostitutes and drowned them in my underground swimming pool.  I could have boiled them, or mutilated them.  It’s not like I had any warning about dying so I could clean the place up.”  
  
“So, Rivera is the only one.”  
  
“Unless you count my father.  And God Himself couldn’t blame me for killing _that_ bastard.”  Ernesto threw a stone moodily across the cobbles of the plaza.  “I wouldn’t even have had to kill him if it hadn’t been for Héctor.  If Héctor had just sold me his songs like a sane man, I wouldn’t have had to kill him.  And if I hadn’t had to do that, then the worst thing Papá would have had to hang over my head would have been a few tail-less stray cats.”  
  
“So now, there are two bodies on you.  Tell me the truth.  Is there a third? You seem to have thought out the prostitute question pretty thoroughly.   Did you pick one off the street for the thrill of it?”  
  
“No.”    
  
 “Well, there’s the Cubano,” Acosta said, obviously bored with the subject.  “All the narcos used to swear by him.”  
  
“The Cubano?”  
  
“I don’t remember his real name.  No one uses it.  They called him the Padrino of Matamoros, back in the world.  He put bodies in a cauldron to do spells.”  
  
“And do they work?  The spells?”  
  
“Never that I’ve heard of.  But you, of course, are so very innocent.  Obviously, it will work for you.”  He smirked unpleasantly.  
  
And that was how Ernesto ended up on another rooftop.  Rooftops here were prime real estate, because you could see out of Odiados from them.  The Cubano worked from a penthouse, and his waiting area overlooked most of the neighborhood.  From here, Ernesto could even see the tower and the bell that had pinned him after his last Sunrise Spectacular.  It had taken forever to gather his bones again after that.  
  
He wondered if an alebrije would make for a good sacrifice.  He’d personally spring for a cauldron large enough to hold that blue monstrosity of the shrew’s.  
  
“I don’t think he can kill alebrijes,” the man in the conquistador’s helmet said. He was waiting on the couch beside Ernesto, watching a couple of street criminals fighting over a place in line on the balcony while a policeman called them names. “I bet the Cubano has tried.  He says the cauldron is weaker here because the bones of people who are already dead don’t have the kind of power that a fresh sacrifice would give it, and the alebrijes are the only thing  here that’s fresh, so he’d definitely have tried one.” He thought about it. “Too bad you let that living boy go. If he were still here, that might be enough juice.”  
  
“If he were still here,” Ernesto said, “then I wouldn’t be here looking for a path out of this place, back to my home.”  
  
The conquistador snorted. “That’s not your home any more, pendejo. In case you didn’t notice.”  
  
“It is my home. I earned every square foot of it.”  
  
“True. No one appreciates how much work a good murder is.”  
  
“I didn’t have it _because_ of killing Héctor!”  
  
“Oh, really? Because I read the papers.”  
  
“That’s _their_ side. I killed Héctor because he was getting in the way of what I already earned.”  
  
Another snort. “You were nothing when you did that. Just another grubby musician scrounging in the gutter and selling himself to rich people. Tell me, did you just seduce the wives, or did you let their husbands have a go at you, too?” The conquistador grinned. “Or maybe you liked that part. I read those articles pretty closely, amigo. Cramming a chorizo down someone’s throat hard enough to do damage isn’t exactly subtle.”  
  
Ernesto got up and walked away toward the balcony rail, having heard enough about the damned chorizo from his neighbors here to last a lifetime. All he’d been thinking of at the time he did that was making it look like Héctor had picked up bad street food, the same kind that had started the whole sequence of events in the first place. It had to go down far enough that it would look like he swallowed it. The symbolism hadn’t occurred to him until the articles started showing up here. Not everyone’s mind was in the gutter when it came to killing. Sometimes, it was just done because it had to be.  
  
“Oh, look,” one of the street thugs said. The markings on his skull were a tattoo of twisted horns, surrounding dripping knives. “It’s the celebridad. My abuela thought you were hot stuff.” He pantomimed playing a guitar. “Ay, ay, ay, ay… Look how far I’ve fallen! Abuelas once loved me, but now I’m just nothing…”  
  
“You have something to say to me?”  
  
“Look—the old man can still talk. Or is he going to sing at us?” He laughed.  
  
“No, he likes playing with poison,” the other one said. “Women’s weapon.”  
  
Ernesto grabbed him and, without giving it much thought, tossed him over the railing. His bones crashed far enough below that they could barely hear him cursing as he put himself back together. “Was there anything else you wanted to say?” he asked the first, then looked over at the policeman. “How about you?”  
  
“Good riddance,” he said, shrugging. “I got sent here for something similar. Only I did it on the other side of the bridge. The girlfriend shot me for it. Don’t know why anyone would care. One less useless piece of trash.” He thought about it. “I should have killed the girl first. She was always smarter than he was. Oh, well.  Live and learn. Or not.”  
  
Ernesto sat down on the railing. Down on the street, the boy was looking for some ribs that had scattered. He shouted up, “You broke my shoulder, cabron!”  
  
“Well, that won’t mend,” the cop said. “What are you looking for from the Cubano?”  
  
“I just need the way out. I can get my place back. There’s always a way.”  
  
The cop pulled out a pack of smokes and offered one over. “You killed someone’s papá for a power ballad. I don’t think you’re getting your audience back.”  
  
Ernesto took the cigarette and lit it. “You just have to figure out how to sell it. It’s probably too late to try and say it was an accident, but maybe I could still play it for sympathy, if I could get out of here. Héctor wants me to apologize. He followed me in here to try and get me to do it. I could probably make a big show of it, and…” He shrugged. “Give it a month, he’ll come around. The bruja he married won’t like it, but I know how to get around her. Always did.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Of course. Tell her that she’s an awful wife. She falls for it every time, because it’s true, and ends up screaming at him for listening to me, and he ends up feeling like he needs to defend me from her.”  
  
“You don’t think it’ll make a difference that he knows you killed him now?”  
  
“He thinks it does. But I know Héctor Rivera. He’ll think he’s being properly cynical if he doesn’t eat or drink anything I give him. I could have him playing the plaza with me in two weeks.  He’d probably be happy about it.  And if my supposed victim forgives me, why wouldn’t anyone else?”  
  
“Supposed? I thought that was a given.”  
  
Adopting a contrite pose, Ernesto said, “Oh, Officer. I never wanted to kill Héctor. Never. He was my friend. I just felt cornered, and in a moment of bad judgment—”  
  
“—that lasted for the several weeks you poisoned him a little at a time?”  
  
“Never in a way that would have been fatal. You can tell, because he didn’t die, that I knew how far I could go, and I regret that so much now. But that last night… I was afraid that he’d realize what was making him sick, and I… I just panicked, and oh, how I wish I could take it back.”  
  
“For an actor, you’re not making that very convincing.”  
  
“It would take some rehearsal,” Ernesto admitted. “What are you looking for here?”  
  
“Bastard I threw off the roof lives next door now. I want something to dissolve him once and for all.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“People like us shouldn’t be living with scum like that.”  
  
“Of course not.”  
  
The cop took a deep drag. The smoke billowed out from his ribs. “This place is an insult. I got rid of trash. How did I end up here? They should build me my own personal ofrenda.”  
  
“I have a thousand of them. Which reminds me… can I use them? I never bothered before, but a change of scenery might be nice.”  
  
“Yeah. They can’t stop you visiting whoever remembers you.  We have our own door to the Department of Family Reunions. But I’ll warn you—if you’re here, you’re not going to like the people who remember you very much.” He looked shrewdly at Ernesto. “And I wouldn’t count on a thousand of them. Probably just some senile abuelas and crazy people now. Your movies were already pretty much for them.”  
  
“My movies were immortal, or I wouldn’t still be here.”  
  
“If that helps you sleep at night…”  
  
They finished smoking in silence, then Ernesto said, “So what happens when we get in to see the Cubano?”  
  
“You have to give him some bones.”  
  
“I need my bones.”  
  
“Not yours.” The cop sized him up. “You should have kept that kid up here instead of tossing him. Maybe you can still get the other one.”  
  
“Whose have you got?”  
  
“None.” He smiled, and reached out, grabbing Ernesto’s lowest rib. “Yet.”  
  
Ernesto shoved him away. “I don’t think so, amigo.”  
  
The cop shrugged, unperturbed.  “Too bad.  You’ve got a lot of juice still, from all the memories.  If I get through, maybe I could send you back something from the far side of Calle Torcida.  Those would probably be stronger.   Maybe the one you call the shrew.”  
  
“If anyone’s going to dismember that bruja, it will be me.” He thought about it.  “You know, I think maybe we could get people to hate her enough to bring her over here on her own.  That would be justice.  She banned music.  Practically abusive of generations of her family.  And she was always an arrogant little puta.  Probably, she still has living people who hate her, and maybe… if I go back on Día de Muertos, maybe I could give them a little shove.  I mean if you think about it, none of this would have happened if it weren’t for her…”  
  
He looked out across the rooftops of Odiados, waiting his turn.  It was ridiculous that he should be here.  
  
None of this was _his_ fault.  



	8. Grown-ups

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the comment, "I still would love to see a dream conversation between Héctor and Enrique at some point" for AtarahDerekh at AO3  
> (I got a little carried away in the set-up...)

  
Héctor was out of sorts, though he tried not to show it.  
  
He loved being home too much to let it spoil the holiday.  But it wasn’t the same without Miguel. He guessed that the subject of the absence would come up when the adults talked the night away, but that was hours from now, and at the moment, all he had to go on was little Coco demanding to know why they didn’t at least call him on the computer.  “He’ll still be asleep, mija,” Luisa said.  “And when he gets up, he has a test.”  
  
“A test?” Héctor repeated.  
  
“He’s in school,” Imelda reminded him.  
  
“Why would he have a test in the middle of the night? What are they teaching him in the Conservatory?”  
  
She smiled indulgently, and tickled under baby Ángel’s chin. He couldn’t see her, but seemed to sense something, and made a grab at her fingers.  He wasn’t really a baby anymore.  He was almost two, and toddling around.  He wasn’t even the baby of the family anymore.  Abel and his wife Serafina had brought their first child (from the looks of it, there would be another one by this time next year), a girl named Antonia.  The family was growing.  Miguel wasn’t here with them.  
  
Imelda shook her head.  “Why don’t you go to the ofrenda and see if he left you a note?”  
  
“No, I can visit with everyone.  I’m sure we’ll find out later.”  
  
“Héctor, just go satisfy yourself on the subject.” She laughed.  “Maybe it’s a new girl,” she suggested.  “It’s been a while since we saw the old one.”  
  
“In that case, I _really_ wonder what he’s being tested on in the middle of the night, at least that he’d tell his mother about.”  
  
“Go check.”  
  
So he wandered to the ofrenda room.  Glowing petals were scattered around, and several in-laws were picking up their offerings. Héctor said hello to the ones he knew and introduced himself to the ones he didn’t, but didn’t start long conversations.  He headed to his picture at the top of the ofrenda.  Sure enough, there was a folded piece of paper.  Coco’s pile of letters was waiting for her as usual, but they were written on airmail stationery.  
  
Héctor frowned and took his own note down.  It was typed, with all sorts of information at the top, and seemed, initially, to be addressed to Miguel’s sister.  But it had come to him when he reached for it, so he read it.  
  
“Hey, Coquis, can you print this for me and leave it on the ofrenda for Papá Héctor?  And you should go talk to everyone at night, too.”  
  
After this, there was a line of dashes, and Miguel had written, “Dear Papá Héctor, Sorry I’m not there.  I’m taking a year in Salzburg to study piano. I have a test at eight o’clock in the morning, which is one o’clock for you, so I can’t even really call.  I’ll get back to my room after and try to sleep, so maybe we can still have our chat.  If you want to hear me play, come on!  I’ll have marigold petals with me here, and I’ll bring your picture to my test.  I’d leave them out before going to bed, but I know you want to be with the family for the party.  I know _I_ want to be with the family for the party.  Come if you can!  If you can’t make it across the sea, maybe you could tell someone, and they could tell me.  I’ll see you next year, definitely.  Austria is too cold for me to stay here full time.  Love you.  Miguel.”  
  
Héctor read it over a few times, trying to absorb the idea that Miguel was halfway to tomorrow already.  He looked around for some bridge to Austria, but nothing appeared.  
  
He went back out and told Imelda and Coco.  They were both impressed.  
  
“Maybe he’ll come back with a German wife!” Coco suggested.  “Well, Austrian.  He is getting toward that age.”  
  
“It’s a different world, mija,” Imelda said.  “I wouldn’t expect it for a while.”  
  
The music started.  Little Coco—apparently, Coquis these days—had the old guitar out, and was doing it proud, in Héctor’s opinion.  She sang “El Latido de mi Corazon,” which was becoming a tradition, then moved into a simpler range.  Rosa took over the heavy lifting with her violin, and little Héctor sang.  He was six now, an angelic little soprano, with the kind of voice Héctor knew would change agreeably, as his own had.  He let himself enjoy the moment, and played his guitar alongside Coquis, who seemed to pick up some strength from him, going for more complicated passages.  Later, he enjoyed the adults’ talk, and picked up a little bit more about Miguel’s trip.  Much of this talk involved fond smiles and many repetitions of the word “stubborn.”  
  
When they went to bed, just after midnight, the dead went to the ofrenda room.  Héctor went with them, accompanied by Dante, who’d joined him once he’d finished getting snacks and playtime with the little ones.  He wasn’t surprised when Dante gave a short, happy bark.  
  
Coquis and little Héctor were standing at the door, hand in hand.  Little Héctor was a little hesitant.  
  
_He looks like me_ , Héctor thought.  _Same name, same face, same voice.  I hope he doesn’t have the same bad luck_.  
  
Dante pulled them in and brought them to the center of the room.  
  
Coquis looked around, a little wide-eyed, and said, “Hi.  I… um… Miguel said you’d be here.  And Dante says… um…”  
  
Dante gave a helpful bark, and Pepita, appearing from the kitchen, wound around her ankles.  
  
“Okay,” she said.  “Well, I guess everyone said stuff about where Miguel is.  He wanted me to come.  Teto wanted to come with me.” She nodded at her brother.  “But he’s scared.  There’s nothing to be scared of Tetito.”  
  
Teto—Héctor was glad to have a nickname for him—didn’t seem convinced, and clung to his sister.  He held a picture of Miguel, face out, like a teddy bear.  If Héctor could get through, he planned to spend at least part of his conversation with Miguel reminding him to call his siblings.  
  
“Remember what Miguel said to say?” Coquis prodded.  
  
Teto bit his lip and looked up at her, then mumbled, “Marigolds.  In the morning.”  
  
Coquis gave him an encouraging smile.  “Pretty good.”  
  
The encouragement didn’t help. Teto looked around again, gulped, and ran back toward the rest of the house.  
  
Coquis rolled her eyes, like world-weary old woman dealing with ridiculous people.  “Sorry,” she said.  “He’s scared of ghosts.  I told him it was all right, but he only listens to Miguel.   Anyway, Miguel is in Salzburg and he should be getting up now so he can get to his piano test.  You should be able to get through, Papá Héctor.  I don’t know if he has anyone else’s picture.  They don’t have Día de Muertos in Austria.  They might not understand.”  
  
Héctor looked around. Sure enough, there was a faint orange glow from behind the ofrenda.  He started toward it, then noticed everyone else looking vaguely confused.  
  
“Looks like it’s just me this time,” he said.  
  
Imelda nodded, and sat down across Coquis, Pepita settling at her knees.  Both she and Coquis stroked the cat.  Dante began introducing everyone.  
  
Héctor tried to find a way around the ofrenda, but there was nothing.  He took a deep breath, then simply stepped through it.  He found himself in the dark.  There was a narrow marigold bridge that seemed to stretch into nowhere.  
  
Not sure what to expect, he followed it.  
  
There was a disorienting kind of _twist_ and then it was morning. Bright, high morning, and he was walking along a path in a city he’d never seen before. The path was only a few petals, hard to find, and they led into a building that looked like a palace, with signs in what looked like German, all with headings that said he was at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg. He followed the path through a double white door into a small theater with padded seats. The walls were eggshell white with ornate gold trim and the stage sat under crystal chandeliers. On the stage was a grand piano.  
  
Somewhere in Héctor’s mind, every year, he knew that Miguel was growing up, but was still surprised by it. The stubborn little boy whose face he’d painted under the bridge was in there somewhere, but the person at the piano was, by any measure, a man. A young one, of course, but still, a man. He looked a good deal like Enrique now, though he was clean shaven.  
  
_He’s my age_ , Héctor realized.  _From now on, he’ll be older than me_.  
  
He was playing a wildly complicated piece of classical music, his hands flying over the keyboard, while a severe-looking gray-haired woman sat nearby with a clipboard. The petals led all the way to the stage, and Héctor followed them up.  A handful of petals sat at the base of a picture frame, which contained a picture of Héctor from the little movie Abel had made a few years ago.  Beside it, there was a note that said, in Spanish, “I should be done by nine-thirty.  I’ll try to be completely asleep at 11:00—that’s 4:00 a.m. for you, Papá Héctor.   There should be time for short talk before it’s sunrise for you.”  
  
If he was giving such a talk any thought at the moment, it didn’t show.  The piece he was playing needed his full attention.  Héctor hadn’t heard him on a piano since he’d started at fourteen.  Seven years later, and he was here, playing Mozart in Salzburg.  
  
Héctor felt an unpleasant and unwelcome twinge of jealousy, and stepped on its head before it could breed.  Miguel had a gift, and he was getting the chance to really explore it.  That was a good thing, a thing to be proud of.  
  
And there were pianos in the Land of the Dead.  If Héctor wanted to learn, he could do so, and no one would stop him.  
  
He listened to the music for a long while, until the instructor stopped it and started giving what seemed like detailed feedback in German… which Miguel seemed to understand and respond in. Héctor did not understand it, and slipped back along the marigold path, coming out into the ofrenda room at the hacienda to find Coco and Imelda looking at the year’s crop of family pictures.  
  
“So, did you go to Austria?” Imelda asked.  “What did it look like?”  
  
“A fairy tale.  With gold ceilings.”  He sighed.  “I don’t know what Miguel is doing there, though, except playing the piano like Apollo playing a lyre. And speaking German. I think I’ll see if I can ask Enrique what’s going on. As long as there’s some time. But get me out of there by four. Miguel’s going to take a nap, and I still want to catch him if I can.”  
  
“Can you do it?” Coco asked. “Talk to Enrique, I mean.”  She’d been disappointed to find herself unable to make that last crossing.  Héctor didn’t really understand why.  Imelda thought it might be because Miguel had known him in the land of the dead and touched him, as a mummy, in the land of the living.  
  
Which didn’t explain why he’d once been able to reach Enrique.  He hadn’t tried again, because he enjoyed getting caught up with Miguel, but he thought it could be done.  Enrique had held the hand of his mummy—which was both living and dead.  Maybe that was why he could do it.  
  
_Maybe I can talk to the doctors, too_ , Héctor thought.  _Or the circus folk_.  
  
Not that he wanted to try.  
  
Coco and Imelda agreed to pull him out of Enrique’s dream—if he could get in—before four, so he could go see Miguel, and he made his way back to the family’s rooms. He wasn’t sure which room belonged to Luisa and Enrique (and truly hoped that it was late enough that everyone in the house was just sleeping at this hour), but he guessed right on his second try. The first try had put him in Teto and Ángel’s room, where the older boy hadn’t gone to bed. He was playing with an army of action figures, watched over by a large picture of himself at four, sitting in Miguel’s lap.  They were all dressed up for Ángel's baptism.  Coquis was standing beside them, holding the baby.  Every now and then, Teto looked up and addressed a question to the picture, which always seemed to give him the answer he wanted.  
  
Enrique and Luisa were in the next room, and, to Héctor’s great relief, they were both asleep, and both wearing nightclothes. He wasn’t sure this would work until he actually touched Enrique’s head.  
  
The connection wasn’t as good as it always was with Miguel. He found himself in the workshop, but he couldn’t see out the windows, and even the edges of the room seemed a little fuzzy. Enrique was younger, sitting at the workbench, teaching Miguel (who seemed about five) how to shine a shoe.  
  
“That’s right, mijo, just give it a good, solid brush. Get all the extra off. You’re good at this…”  
  
Héctor cleared his throat a few times.  
  
Enrique looked up. Miguel, not really being here, continued polishing his own boots, taking no notice.  
  
“Papá Héctor?” Enrique asked.  
  
“That’s right, mijo,” Héctor said, and smiled at the little boy on the shoeshine bench. “I see you miss him this year, too.”  
  
“Every second.”  Enrique looked back at little Miguel, then smiled.  “I love the big version, too.  But he doesn’t need me nearly as much.”  
  
“I’m going to tell him to call you.”  
  
“He calls.  Every week.  Sometimes twice.” Enrique shrugged.  “The little ones want him to call every day, sometimes twice.  Which he does sometimes from the Conservatory, but with the time difference this year, it’s a little strange.”  
  
“Which brings us to Salzburg.  What’s he doing in Salzburg?”  
  
Enrique sighed and aged, and the workshop disappeared, little Miguel along with it. Now, they were sitting in, of all places, the cemetery, on a bench beside Héctor’s grave. “There was a whole argument about Miguel’s music,” he said. “Someone told him he’d never learn proper classical music, and someone else said he _shouldn’t_ and someone else entirely decided that piano wasn’t his proper instrument and someone else said—”  
  
“Who are all these ‘someones’?” Héctor asked. “And why is it their business?”  
  
“That was exactly what Miguel asked.” Enrique sighed. “My son is stubborn, in case you’ve forgotten. He didn’t like complete strangers arguing about what kind of music he’d be able to play. So he put his nose to the grindstone and is doing a term in Salzburg to prove that he’s capable of playing whatever he decides to play and that no one has the right to tell him not to.”  
  
“And he learned German.”  
  
“It’s offered at the Conservatory, for the classical opera students. Italian, too.”  
  
“He speaks Italian?”  
  
Enrique nodded and smiled with weary love. “He picked up Zapoteco, too, at least enough to get by in San Pedro. It’s like when he stopped hiding what he really wanted, he… he could do almost anything he set his mind to. We thought he was over-promising. But he has a good ear. _German._ I have a son who speaks German and plays Mozart.”  
  
Héctor grinned. “I know how  you feel.  I remember when I did the math and realized that Coco was forty. Probably with her own children. Maybe grandchildren if she’d started as early as Imelda and I did, though, to my immense relief, that wasn’t the case. Berto was still a solid decade away.”  
  
“And Glorita and I were another six and eight years from there.” Enrique looked at the grave. “Not that I’m not glad you and Mamá Imelda had Mamá Coco. But I’m also glad that Miguel’s idolization didn’t… you know, lead him to…”  
  
“Throw everything away at seventeen?”  
  
“Not throw away. I’m sure he’d have been able to have a happy life, but…”  
  
“But it’s a different world than it was, and Miguel has had opportunities that never would have been there for Imelda and me.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Don’t worry. I’m on your side there.”  Héctor leaned forward and looked at his gravestone. Imelda’s name was starting to wear a little bit, as it had been there for almost sixty years.  His own name had been freshly carved only eight years ago.  It looked like he’d  just died.  “Imelda and I didn’t have anything to throw away.  All we had was each other.  And then Coco.  They made me feel rich.”  
  
“I know,” Enrique said.  “And I do want that for Miguel someday.  Just…”  
  
“Not yet?”  
  
“Not  yet.”  
  
Héctor laughed.  “Coco wants him to come home with a German wife.”  
  
“Mamá Coco was always a matchmaker.  You should have seen her when she decided I should marry Luisa.  Who, by the way, may be a distant cousin.  You may be our cousin on another line, at least if those tests are right.”  
  
“Tests?”  
  
“They can test things like that.  You might have come from Luisa’s village.  You match a lot of them.”  
  
“Wow,” Héctor said.  “That’s a hundred percent more than I ever knew about where I came from.”  
  
“It’s an interesting new world.  I’m not sure where to put being my wife’s cousin in the scheme of things.”  
  
“It’s more or less the way things always worked before we started keeping track, I think.”  
  
“Probably.  Anyway, maybe that’s why our kids seem to have more of you than Berto and Carmen’s.”  
  
“Maybe. Maybe it’s just fate.”  
  
Enrique was looking off into the distance.  “Miguel’s actually thinking about a doctorate in historical musicology,” he said, sounding baffled. “I don’t even know what it means.”  
  
“Don’t ask me, I never spent a day in school. Unless you count the forensics lab where they had my body. I spent long enough there that maybe I should have a medical degree.”  
  
Enrique looked up sharply. “I wouldn’t imagine you saying that.” He shook his head. “I mean, you’re really you. You’re here.”  
  
“I think so.”  
  
“Wow. I guess I always wondered how Miguel could be so sure when he said he talked to you every year. That it wasn’t just a dream. But I’m definitely talking to someone who’s not in my head.”  
  
“Well, technically, I’m in your head.” Héctor looked down at the grave. “Why are we here?”  
  
“I talk to you here sometimes about Miguel.  I thought I was doing it again in a dream.”  
  
“You talk to me?”  
  
“It’s during the year. I guess you don’t hear.”  
  
“Not really. But keep talking. I’m glad to… well, listen. I may even still have ears.” He grinned.  “Maybe the circus even pierced them.”  
  
“You can laugh at that?”  
  
“Only with family. And especially with the one who got me out of there and brought me home. I never really said thank you, mijo. You’re good bisnieto. I’m grateful for you. And _to_ you.”  
  
“I’m glad we found you. Things have been so much better with you back where you belong. It’s not just the music. Everything is better.”  
  
“I don’t have much to do with that.”  
  
“You do, though. It’s hard to explain. But…” He thought about it. “I grew up thinking I was descended from a man who would run away. That I was always just one bad decision away from losing everything. But when I found out you were a good man who wanted to come home… it made everything different. I can’t explain why it mattered so much. But it mattered.”  
  
“You were already a good father. I can tell because you were worried about being a bad one. Bad fathers tend not to worry too much about the subject. Besides, you already had one pretty terrific son.”  
  
“He was unhappy.”  
  
“Sometimes, children are unhappy. And he didn’t tell you why, so…”  
  
“So, I still feel like I should have known. You gave him what made him happy.”  
  
Héctor shrugged. “The first thing I told him was that I hated musicians and we were all self-centered jerks. Luckily, Miguel picked up a stubborn streak.”  
  
“Yes. Luckily. And now, he’s in Austria. And I don’t know where he’ll be next.”  
  
“You know where he’ll always be,” Héctor said, and pointed to Enrique’s chest.  
  
“Yes. There’s that. But I sort of miss him in the workshop. I knew I would. I didn’t know how much.”  
  
“I sometimes miss my little Coco even when I’m sitting across the table from the final version. She was so cute. I thought there was never a cuter baby in the history of babies.  I’m still pretty sure I was right.”  
  
“And to me, she’s Abuelita.”  
  
“And Mamá to Elena and Victoria.” Héctor shrugged. “That’s life. We’re all different things to different people. But all of those things are real. Someday, Miguel will be someone’s papa and abuelo and bisabuelo. But he’ll still be the little shoeshine boy in the workshop, too.”  
  
Enrique smiled. “Don’t mind me. Luisa says I have a maudlin streak.”  
  
“I’m a musician. We live on maudlin streaks.” Héctor smiled. “But don’t worry about Miguel. He’ll be okay.” There was a tap on his shoulder. “And I need to go talk to him now. I’ll remind him to give you a call later.”  
  
With one last look, Héctor stood up from the bench, and then he was back in the ofrenda room. The petals leading through the bend in space to Miguel were still there. He followed them.  
  
  



	9. Fitting In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the comment, "how is Miguel’s life in the Conservatory? He’s not just another student?" for PhantomD at AO3 (comment on "A Handful of Light")

_En el mundo,  
El sol quema  
Escucho el grito  
Y pierdo lagrimas  
Me voy volando  
al mundo mas alla  
Donde el aire es dulce  
En la sombra  
  
In the world,   
the sun beats down  
the screams take over  
And the whispers drown  
So I fly away  
to a place I know  
Where it's cool and sweet  
In the shadow  
_  
The apartment had been the first mistake.  
  
Mamá Elena had insisted on a decent apartment not too far from the Conservatory. The settlement with the studio had left enough wiggle room for everyone to go to school, and to not live in squalor in the process, and Miguel had also been making some music money in the plaza—which had been invested and had grown decently—and, during his final year of high school, he’d written a song called “En La Sombra,” mostly about all of the things whose shapes fell over his life, and how he wouldn’t want to get out from under them. Santa Cecilia had hosted a music festival, and he’d played it in the Plaza. The lead singer of Las Lechuzas, a metal band from Chiapas riding their first solid hit, had heard it, and approached Miguel about the rights. At first, he hadn’t been sure. The idea of one of his songs going into someone else’s hands and being re-done in a new style was more than a little frightening.   
  
But Chimo, the singer, was also a songwriter and understood the fear, so he’d played his metal arrangement before Miguel actually agreed to anything. It had been amazing—somehow blending the band’s signature heavy electric guitars with the recognizable ranchera melody Miguel had written. It sounded fresh and modern without sacrificing its identity, and it was like hearing his own song for the first time. Miguel had been tempted to just let Chimo have it to see how the audience responded, but good sense had prevailed, and, with the help of one of the lawyers from the Rivera Institute, he’d made his first real sale.  
  
The song had gone to the top of the charts, and Chimo had bought four more for the next album. He’d only ended up using two of them, but while Miguel had been on the road with Papá last year, one had gone gold and the other had gone platinum. Miguel’s name was small on the album credits, and he’d asked them not to use his story in selling anything, so he thought he’d avoided the freak show.  
  
Until he started at the Conservatory.  
  
The apartment hadn’t occurred to him as a problem at first, because it was tiny.  It was a one-bedroom place, and the bedroom barely had room for a bed.  He didn’t live extravagantly… or at least he didn’t think so.  Maybe that was because, subconsciously, he was comparing his own apartment to de la Cruz’s mansion across town.  
  
Other people had other points of comparison.   Most of his classmates lived with multiple roommates in questionable neighborhoods, while he lived alone in Polanco in a place where the living room was big enough to build a guitar (as long as he wasn’t trying to do anything else). No one believed the family was paying for it with shoe sales, and the few visitors he’d had eyed it with barely disguised annoyance.  People seemed to think he was using it for various dating opportunities that it presented. He wasn’t sure where they thought he found the time.  He had a full course load, and was picking up two new instruments (trumpet and clarinet) and learning German and Italian. He was also playing with an idea for a musical about a migrant caravan Rosa was doing a thesis on, writing two songs a week, and occasionally sitting in with Carlos’s band.  
  
Not that he didn’t _want_ to date. It was just that the only girls he saw regularly enough to get to know them were at the Conservatory, and that was where the problems were.  
  
The fact that he was coming in as a viral meme hadn’t much helped. The summer he and Papá had spent traveling, he’d performed in plazas up and down the western hemisphere, and somehow or other this had ended up with spliced videos showing him dancing around the world in his mariachi uniform.  It had seemed funny and harmless, but it meant his face was known, his name was known, and the old news stories had been re-hashed across the internet. A site called Chismes had made the connection to Las Lechuzas, and by the time Miguel had been on campus for a week, everyone thought he was independently wealthy and famous… the things they were struggling just to get a taste of. Some admired him for his supposed achievement, others called him a sell-out. No one cared that most of the money had been carefully saved and invested over the years, that nothing came in directly from the meme, and that his cut of the Lechuzas songs was fairly small. All they saw was that he had a career ready to be picked up at will, and that he lived in a nice (if small) apartment in a fairly spectacular neighborhood.  
  
It hadn’t made it easy to participate in most of the school’s productions, let alone make friends on them.  
  
“Don’t sweat it,” Carlos said over a working lunch in a practice room, shortly after Miguel got back from his new brother’s baptism. “They’ll get over it. Every time I have a book come out, I get it from the faculty. I should be publishing _serious_ articles in respectable journals, not seedy tell-alls about the golden age of Mexican cinema.”  
  
“Seedy tell-alls?” Miguel repeated.   
  
“Of course. I’m just spreading old gossip around to pay for my extravagant lifestyle.”  
  
“It’s all researched! I know, because I helped you do it.”  
  
“And yet.” He reached over and pointed at a marimba passage. “You’ve got way too much ornamentation there.”  
  
“I like ornamentation.”  
  
“And a soloist would love you for that, but you’ve got it competing with the brass, and it’s just as heavy.”  
  
Miguel frowned at it. “I like the brass, too. Couldn’t it be, like, they’re _trying_ to compete for the audience’s attention?”  
  
“I think you’ll just get a cacophony this way. Maybe a call and response? Or you could do it as separate movements, you know. You don’t need to put every trick in your bag into a three minute song.” He nodded. “You do the trumpet. I’ll hit the marimba on the piano. You’ll see.”  
  
“I can do the piano…”  
  
“You wanted to learn a brass. Don’t fall back on your strengths. Be daring.”  
  
“Piano used to be daring. I’m a guitar player!”  
  
“Who took to keyboards like a fish to water. When you step up your keyboard game and start playing harder pieces than this, it will be daring again.”  
  
“Fine.” Miguel picked up the trumpet and managed not to make an awful job of his own melody line, but Carlos was right. There was too much going on at the same time with the marimba part. He sighed. “All right. I’ll make it another movement.”  
  
“Try it as a four-movement symphony,” Carlos said, smirking. “You know you want to.”  
  
“I don’t know the form.”  
  
“That’s why you need to take my class.”  
  
“Next term. I will. I like classical music. It’s not like I’m sitting around plotting to avoid it. I just wanted to get some German and Italian under my belt so I could do the operas.”   
  
“That’s actually pretty practical.” Carlos scanned the score and made some notes on the violin line, which Miguel had managed to keep subdued.  
  
“I like opera. I mean, the ones I’ve heard.  I’ve read the librettos in translation.  Maybe I could translate one into Spanish.”  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
Miguel bit his lip. “Or maybe I shouldn’t be doing classical. Maybe I should… stick to…  you know…”  
  
“If you say ‘the status quo,’ I’ll dock you five points on your final grade.”  
  
“ _My_ stuff.”  
  
“You want to go through the Conservatory only playing your own songs?  That’s kind of arrogant.”  
  
“No!  I mean… No. That’s not what I mean.”  
  
Carlos sighed.  “I have a feeling I know what you mean, and I was hoping it would take a little longer to get here. I noticed you were getting twitchy. What’s going on?”  
  
“I shouldn’t be living in that apartment.”  
  
“You have money and you have success. It’s all right to have a few creature comforts and a safe walk home. The starving artist stereotype is played out. Next?”  
  
“I just…”  Miguel tapped his pen against the staff, wishing there was a way to say this that was as easy as lining up notes.  Finally, he said, “I was playing some Mozart the other day. Just practicing in the auditorium.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“And… someone said that I should stick to the guitar. That I shouldn’t… I don’t know.”  
  
“Who is this someone?”  
  
“No one.   It doesn’t matter.  He said I should only play ‘my’ music, whatever that means.”  
  
“Mozart is everyone’s music. So is Segovia. So is Rivera, for that matter. _Music_ is everyone’s music. I’ve been trying to drill that into your head for years, because I knew you’d run into this bullshit when you got here.  It’s stupid, but it’s widespread.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“So, what’s the problem?”  
  
“Someone else said I sold out. Because of the Lechuzas.”  
  
“Ah.  Another someone.  Does it matter who this one is?”  
  
“One of the girls I’m taking trumpet with.”  
  
“Mm-hmm.”  
  
Miguel wasn’t even sure how to address the last accusation, the one that actually hurt.  “And…”  
  
“Go on. Spit it out, Miguel.  I promise, there’s nothing I haven’t heard around here.”  
  
“And someone _else_ saw me in my charro suit and sombrero and was… weirdly mad about it for some reason.  It made _me_ mad,” he said. “It’s like insulting me, you, Papá Héctor, and half the people I know.”  
  
“Yes.  It is.”  
  
“And then I have all of these people who saw me on YouTube, and they’re always telling me, ‘Oh, you should do this song or that song.’ Someone said I could be the next Ritchie Valens, and I should do ‘La Bamba.’”  
  
“It’s not a bad song.”  
  
“It’s a good song, but I don’t want to do it, and I don’t _have_ to do it.”  
  
Carlos sighed. “And what do you want to do about all of this?”  
  
“Honestly? I want to play heavy metal Mozart in a sombrero, just to annoy all of them.”  
  
“Metallica did a cover of Symphony number 40. It’s pretty good. But, alas, no sombreros.”  
  
Miguel laughed, then sighed and put down the trumpet. “It’s just… I guess I figured I’d meet people like me here. Have…”  
  
“Musical friends to play with?”  
  
“Well… kind of.” It was more than that, of course, but Miguel figured Carlos knew it. For the last six years, he’d been playing in the plaza in Santa Cecilia, and he loved doing it. He loved the old mariachis who cheered him on, and he still loved the old ranchera music that had first cast the spell over him. But every time he’d tried to expand on it, every time he’d tried to share some new discovery, most of them hadn’t cared. They hadn’t been actively hostile, but they hadn’t taken a lot of interest in the things Miguel thought of as amazing discoveries. He’d been looking forward to the Conservatory because he’d assumed that everyone here would love music like he did, that they’d have been listening to everything and trying everything for years, just like he had. That every sound would have fascinated them, that every style would have entranced them. Surely, one of them had created Mexirlandesicano dancing on a lark, or tried to set K-pop to African drums, or spent a few lazy Sundays trying to translate English songs into Spanish and get the right rhythm and rhyme while still making sense (and at least approaching the same topic as the original).   
  
Wasn’t that part of being crazy about music? Just wanting it to be in every corner of your life, and to explore all of its strange little by-ways?  
  
But if there were such people, they seemed to be keeping their heads down. Miguel had found himself publicly shamed for his musical tastes on more than one occasion. Different people had different axes to grind, but it all boiled down to the idea that he wasn’t _serious_. They had clearly thought so when they recognized him from the meme, but learning that he considered Papá Héctor to be a fine songwriter (it was fashionable here to treat him like a country bumpkin who might have had potential if he’d had a ‘real education’), or that he respected Billy Joel and Paul McCartney (“popular junk food”), or that he’d only been playing the piano since he was thirteen, or… for all he knew, maybe that he was from Oaxaca and knew how to shine his own shoes… All of it seemed to pale next to their experiences, playing piano since they were toddlers, some of them having written extensive political histories of ranchera music, others refusing to acknowledge it in favor of “superior” traditions. One girl had written a complete symphony at ten. Her attitude toward Miguel’s story of teaching himself guitar on an old beater by watching de la Cruz movies had been one of utter contempt.  
  
Carlos tapped one long finger on the closed piano, then said, “Miguel, if you’re looking for a lot of people like you, there may be some disappointment in store. In all my life, I’ve only met one person like you.”  
  
“Well, I don’t mean _exactly_ …”  
  
“I know what you mean. And what I say still stands.”  
  
“I just wanted to meet people who love music. Maybe even”—Miguel dared himself to both think and say it—“meet someone who loves it like I do and who I could… you know… maybe…”  
  
“You’re looking for someone new to fall in love with?” Carlos grinned. “Chamaco, you better just let that happen, instead of trying to shop in your classes.”  
  
Miguel rolled his eyes and made a vaguely obscene gesture in his teacher’s direction.  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought everyone would have fun with music. But it’s like they use it to hit people with instead.”  
  
“They aren’t all like that. There are people who have fun on stage, too. I think you’ll meet more of them if you do some group performance classes. Or start a band. You’ll find the regular musicians when they show up to rehearse.”  
  
“And if they don’t show up to rehearse, I’ll know what kind they are, too.”  
  
“That, my friend, is an absolute and eternal truth of life.”   
  
“I guess I just thought I’d fit in better here.”  
  
Carlos ran his finger along the brass line of Miguel’s project again, then said, “I think there are a lot of people who feel that way when they first get to college.  People who… well, people like us.  We never fit in where we came from.  We were always just that little bit different.”  
  
“I love Santa Cecilia.  I…”  
  
“Of course you do. I didn’t say you didn’t. I said you didn’t quite fit, and you know that’s true.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“So, we never quite fit.  We’re shaped funny for the places we come from.  But we _do_ come from them, and they shape us, too.  So when we get here, we’re shaped funny for _this_ place.”  
  
“Where aren’t we shaped funny for?”  
  
“I seem to be exactly the right shape for my wife and daughter.”  
  
“How did you find them?  Well, find Tina, anyway.”  
  
“She’s a hobby musician. We were in an orchestra together.  And I talked her into a show I was directing.  She has a really beautiful voice.  But she’s not in this world, and doesn’t want to be.  That keeps me from worrying too much when I run up against the spots where _I_ don’t fit.”  
  
“Which brings us back to me not meeting anyone.”  
  
“What happened to the redhead?”  
  
“It’s very hard to date someone who’s now thirty-two hundred miles away from where I want to live.  And I’m a pretty similar distance from where _she_ wants to live.  Turns out to be a pretty big problem when it comes to fitting.”  
  
“Math is ruthless.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“But you don’t have to worry about that.  You seem to be more or less the exact right shape for your parents and your sister and your brothers.  If my daughter worshipped me half as much as your sister worships you, I’d be ecstatic. That’s a lot. There are a lot of musicians who don’t fit their families.  So they look for other people who are shaped exactly the same way they are, and they come in and declare that they’re fine and it’s everyone else who doesn’t fit.”  
  
“Am I ever going to fit here?”  
  
“I think so.  Not in with your ‘someones,’ of course. But you’ll get your footing.  And stop worrying about the rest.  You’ll be fine.”  
  
“Mamá Elena thinks I mostly came here to find a wife.”  
  
“From what you’re saying, it sounds like she has a point.  But you really shouldn’t be.  You know better than anyone that nests of musicians are worse than viper nests.  We’re terrible people, really.”  
  
“Selfish jerks,” Miguel agreed, remembering Papá Héctor and smiling.  
  
“Utterly irredeemable.”  Carlos grinned.  “Now, are you going to stop worrying about the someones and get back to work?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And not let them in your head anymore?”  
  
“I’ll try.”  
  
Carlos shrugged. “That’s probably the best you can do.  Meanwhile, play, write, and listen to whatever the hell you want.”  
  
“Well, yeah. I never actually was thinking of stopping.”  
  
“Good.”  He opened the piano cover and put the score back up.  “Now, back to this. If you _really_ want this ornamentation, I think you should do it as a call and response between the trumpet player and the marimba…”  
  



	10. El Bandido

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the comment "And you know what would have been amusing/disturbing? If Ernesto ever attended any of those traveling display things that Hector ended up in" for Bookwormgal at A03.

Ernesto didn’t want to be anywhere near the Carpas.  
  
Aside from the fact that he didn’t want to run into anyone he knew back when he’d had a partner—there could be awkward questions—he just felt that, having done supporting roles in a dozen movies, he really should have shaken the donkey-excrement-laden dirt from his boots years ago.  He’d had enough of the damned traveling shows to last a lifetime, and this one was barely even a show.  It was a little circus, with a little singing, and a lot of sideshow freaks to entertain the rubes.  According to the marquee sign, they even had a mummy in there somewhere.  
  
He did not want to be here, hated having to be here, and frequently fantasized about bashing the director’s skull against a brick wall for forcing everyone into this.     
  
But the new movie was about a circus family. The cast was traveling around, pretending to be part of the circus, so when the movie came out, everyone would believe the story about how authentic it was. Never mind that Ernesto had been seen—and prominently—in so many other movies, or that the lead (an overdressed dandy who called himself Antonio Duras, though his real name was Delmar Escarrá) had been on posters all over the country for five years, or that the silly little twist playing the love interest didn’t have enough talent to make it in even the cheapest circus wandering around Baja California.  As far as Ernesto could tell, Brisa’s greatest, and only, talent was managing to keep her blouse from actually slipping off the tips of her breasts, where it generally rested in an extremely precarious way.   
  
She was supposed to be playing a singer with the most angelic voice in the land, but she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.  He, who could actually sing and dance, was supposed to be a tightrope walker who was madly in love with her. He didn’t know what the dialogue was meant to end up being—the dialogue cards were being put in right now—though they’d made a great dumb show of batting their eyes at each other.  On camera, he had to wear tights and an undershirt (a woman came in an spritzed his chest hair to make it shiny), but he had utterly refused to disgrace himself here that way.  
  
“So what am I supposed to do with this one?” the matron of the circus had snorted two days ago.  “Teach him to clown?”  
  
Ernesto had brought the guitar with him.  He got it out, tuned up the beginning of “Recuerdame,” and had barely finished the first verse when she announced that he would be headlining in place of Delmar’s trick horse riding (which, to be fair, wasn’t an entirely awful act; Delmar had come up in the northern Carpas just as Ernesto had come up in the southern ones, and unlike Brisa, he knew what he was doing).  So Ernesto de la Cruz was singing in the Carpas again, even if it was only for the length of time it took to get some newspaper articles written.  
  
“Old home week, isn’t it?”  
  
He looked up. Delmar was coming out of the unassuming tent that some of the performers used for practice, mopping at his face with a towel.  He had on his taleguilla and stockings, with little beribboned slippers, but he wasn’t wearing the fancy gold jacket.  In fact, he was bare-chested.  He looked like half a bullfighter, though Ernesto doubted any self-respecting bull would bother with him.  Out of his suave movie costume, he was a skinny kid.  He actually reminded Ernesto of Héctor in some obscure way, though beyond the body type, they didn’t really look alike.  
  
Maybe it was because he had Héctor on the brain lately.  Probably just the venue.  Or maybe he was thinking of Héctor because Delmar had a bit of him in his attitude.  He wasn’t sure.  
  
“You did these things, right?” he asked, nodding at the tents.  
  
“What?” Ernesto asked.   “Oh.  Yes. A million years ago.”  
  
“It’s kind of fun to be back.  Not that I’d give up swashbuckling.”  He grinned and feigned a swordfight, jumping up onto a crate.  “En garde!”  When Ernesto didn’t respond, he bounced down and sat on the crate, swinging his ridiculously clad feet.  “Come on, Nesto.  You have to admit, movies are the best fun.  It’s like playing pretend, only you get paid for it.  It’s a lot less real work than this.”  He pointed around at the tents.  “When I was a kid, I used to do three shows a day with my family sometimes.  I had this horse named Girasol.  She always knew when I was about to lose my balance, and she covered for me.  I don’t know how she knew.  I used to be able to stand on her back and sing while she pranced.”  
  
Ernesto rolled his eyes.  Delmar had been angling to sing with him since yesterday, but so far hadn’t asked outright.  It wasn’t going to happen. He’d decided the night Héctor died that he didn’t want any more partners.  “I never learned to ride,” he said.  “At least not the fancy stuff.”  
  
“I’ll teach you. It’s easy.”  
  
“It’s a dying skill set, my friend.  No one will be riding horses anywhere in ten years.”  
  
“They will in movies.”  He leaned over and looked into the crate, then grinned and pulled up a bottle of sotol that had been hidden there.  “Carpa people,” he said. “They never change.  I’ll buy them some new.  Drink?”  
  
“No, thanks.”  
  
“Anyway, nobody wants to watch movies about modern people.  They’ll always want pirates and knights errant.  And we, as actors, will always be Quixote, tilting at our pretend windmills for them.  You don’t drive a motorcar to fight a giant.  It will always be a horse.”   
  
He took a swig of the sotol, and Ernesto wondered if it would be worth it to slip a little turpentine in there to shut him up.  He decided that it probably wasn’t.  Delmar was irritating, but the way movies were going, he wasn’t going to be an obstacle for long.  
  
“What?” he asked, looking around comically.  “Did I grow a third eye, or are you just staring at my sweaty manliness?’  
  
“What do you mean?” Ernesto asked.  
  
“You were looking at me like you had an idea.  I was wondering what it might be.”  
  
“Oh.  No ideas.”  Ernesto sat down on a lower crate across from him.  “Just thinking about movies.”  
  
“Did you see that Yanqui one that talks and sings?”  
  
“Yes.  Impressive.”  
  
“You’re a man of few words, for an actor. Do you think we’ll get it?”  
  
“ _The Jazz Singer_?”  
  
“Sound.”  
  
“Oh. Definitely. I’m sure they’re already working on it.”  
  
And he _was_ sure.  The woman he was currently entertaining in the evenings at  home (though she wouldn’t deign to come up here to Sonora) was completely committed to keeping up with the technology, and she was paying for people to come down to Mexico City and spread it around.  
  
The movie itself, he barely remembered.  It was some Jewish thing, with a boy who was only supposed sing in a choir or something, but he wanted to be a jazz singer in a minstrel show instead.  Mostly forgettable, except for one scene where the man was putting on black makeup, covering up his own features and talking about how he wanted to sing the songs of his own people (why, Ernesto didn’t know; what he’d heard sounded more like wailing than music), but utterly obliterating his own identity even as he spoke.  In a movie full of the usual empty movie platitudes, the scene had stuck out as an almost shockingly naked statement about what it took to make it in the business.  
  
Ernesto wasn’t interested in making naked statements about cultural obliteration, but he was interested in the way the film and the sound synced up… and in the fact that the first thing they’d wanted to film was singing.  He’d always known it would be this way, but he’d hoped that Mexican cinema would get to it first.  Nevertheless, the release of _The Jazz Singer_ kept him going, even through this ridiculous sideshow attraction for this absurd and soon-to-be-obsolete movie.  Because, while some of the actors he worked with (including Delmar) could out swashbuckle him, none of them had his voice.  None of them could play instruments worth a damn.  In a world of musical movies, Ernesto de la Cruz would no longer be a supporting player.  
  
And Héctor had thought movies were a fad.  
  
Delmar took another swig of sotol and looked down the dusty path with inexplicable affection.  “You been down the sideshow row yet?”  
  
“Why would I do that?”  
  
“Sideshow guys are funny.  We had a strongman back in ours.  Guzman.  Most of his weights were fake for the show, of course, but he _was_ strong. He used to eat refritos for a day then see how long he could hold the farts.”  
  
“A true showman.”  
  
“The record was thirty seconds.  It was a beautiful thing.  My brothers and I egged him on.”   He drank more, this time looking a little morose. His brothers, Ernesto knew, had all died in the war.  Possibly, the farting strongman had as well.  “Anyway,” he went on, “this one has all the trimmings.  They’ve got a fire swallower, and a dwarf, and a skeleton girl…”  
  
“A what?”  
  
“She’s just really skinny.  She has a picture of a fat girl, and she says she was cursed by gypsies for gluttony.  Of course, the fat girl looks nothing like her, but…” He shrugged.  “Rubes.  There are also these twin sisters who have three legs between them.  They share one.  They have  special stool to sit on and everything.  We could never swing real Siamese twins.  These guys must be doing well.”  
  
“No doubt.  They can even afford movie stars.”  
  
“The biggest sideshow freaks of all,” Delmar agreed, and tipped the bottle up in an invisible toast.  “So did you see it?  They’ve got a pirate mummy.”  
  
“I saw the picture on the marquee.  What is it really, a piece of driftwood with an eyepatch on it?”  
  
“No idea. The twins said that last year, he was the mariachi mummy.  The year before that, he was a Egyptian pharaoh.” He shrugged. “It could be a real mummy.  My father had a chance to buy one back in ’13 or ’14.  He didn’t. He said it was disrespectful.  So someone else made money off of it instead. Big business since Tut.”  
  
“Didn’t you go look at it?”  
  
“No. I started to, but then I heard my papá going on about disrespect.  From a man who owned his own sideshow.  But I…”  He gave an awkward shrug.  
  
And for a moment, he didn’t just _remind_ Ernesto of Héctor.  He _was_ Héctor, squirming around like a pinned snake when he was trying to pretend something didn’t really bother him.  Ernesto had once, just as a joke, pushed one of the tavern girls at Héctor and offered to foot the bill (that was before the shrew had unlocked her cast iron knickers for him), and he’d laughed nervously and said he didn’t want to make the other men jealous, and he’d looked everywhere but at the girl, who was cackling raucously.  “What, are you too good for me?” she’d asked, and Héctor had squirmed, just like this, and said that no, of course not, he was no better than anyone else, probably worse, and…  
  
Delmar belched, and the illusion was broken.  “Anyway, I’m going to go get lunch before the show. Want to come into town with me?”  
  
“There’s a town?”  
  
“After a fashion.”  
  
“I’ll skip it.”  
  
“Your loss, I’m sure.”  He took the bottle and walked off, weaving a little bit.  He’d sober up before the show.  
  
Ernesto wandered around the wagons people lived in when they were on the road.  The real tightrope walker had chickens, and several of the performers were buying eggs from him.  The woman who ran the show was sitting outside her tent, counting the day’s take.  He slipped between the wagons toward the midway.  Brisa was wobbling around on her high heels, with one of the gravity-defying blouses on, along with a skirt that barely covered her knees, carrying a tray of cigarettes.  She’d made no secret of the fact that she would lose even these bits if Ernesto so much as grinned at her, so he made a quick exit.  He had a socialite to entertain, and she had a lot more to offer in return than a half-baked movie actress.  
  
Which was why he turned left into the sideshow instead of going straight down the midway.  
  
He walked the center aisle without much interest, giving big grins to rubes who’d heard him at yesterday’s show and pointed at him. There was a tiny man in a military uniform, and a man swallowing swords. A strongman (Ernesto’s practiced eye with props told him that the barbells were, as usual, fake). A fat man. Some poor soul dragged in from the jungle and pierced all over.  The twins with the shared leg.  The skinny woman with the fat picture.  (Why anyone who’d been through the war would be impressed with someone starving herself was beyond Ernesto.)  
  
Same old sideshows.  
  
And, at the end of the row, with a line stretching down past three more exhibits, was the mummy’s tent.  Ernesto didn’t really mean to go see it. He’d seen mummies before. They looked like stuffed leather sacks with bones stuck into them.  
  
“Two pesos! Step up and see the Bandido de la Bahía, terror of the high seas!” a huckster called. “Set adrift after his crew mutinied, and turned to leather right in his rowboat!”  
  
“Can we see him, Papá?” a little girl asked.  
  
The huckster, sensing prey, leaned in. “Oh, he may be too terrifying for a little girl like you!”  
  
“I’m brave!”  
  
“Why, a man like that, even in life, was too frightening. But cursed in death? Oh, I don’t know…”  
  
“I’m brave enough! Papá, tell him I’m brave! I fought a coyote away from the hens all by myself!”  
  
“Well, I’m sure you’re brave, but if something were to happen to you… why, I could be in trouble. I don’t know. Maybe for a few extra pesos, just as insurance…”  
  
Ernesto rolled his eyes. These shows never changed. He slipped behind the huckster and into the tent. There were several wooden boards telling the daring story of the Bandido da la Bahía, who, they claimed, had pillaged his way up the coast and finally double-crossed his crew one too many times.  
  
More likely, he was bought for a dime from an undertaker across the border. Maybe embalmed.  Or he was driftwood.  
  
Ernesto wandered further into the tent. There were ridiculous paintings of the Bandido, swashbuckling around. He had a mop of black hair and darkly tanned skin. In most of the paintings, he was wielding a saber, though he had a gun in some of them. Other items in the case were claimed to come from the rowboat he’d been found in. There was a gun (an ornate stage prop), a saber that no one seemed to have noticed was round and had a ball at the end for fencing practice, and a few old doubloons that might actually have come from a wreck. Plus a lot of garish scarves and jackets.  
  
He paused, looking at these “pirate” clothes. They were cheaply embroidered and cheaply made. And, unless he was mistaken—and experience suggested otherwise—they were charro suits. They’d had some mud thrown on them, but they weren’t at all sun-bleached. Apparently, the show knew perfectly well that the rubes would want to see colorful clothes and not question how sun strong enough to make a mummy would fail to bleach out his spare clothing. Or why the deposed captain was sent out to die with half his wardrobe and…  
  
Why were the clothes familiar?  
  
Well, that was a stupid question. You could get knock-off costumes anywhere. Probably with fringed sombreros. He’d seen lots of them in…  
  
In the train car where Héctor Rivera had died.  
  
He’d been lying on top of them as he vomited and gasped and finally, after three false alarms, stopped breathing for good.  
  
Ernesto had rifled through the pile, looking for something that wasn’t quite as readily identifiable as the ashes-of-roses suit Héctor had actually been wearing, the one that the shrew had embroidered with their names on the inner lining, linked in gold thread.   No one would believe that suit belonged to a vagrant.  Ernesto had needed something that at least _sort_ of fit. He’d finally found a thin purple jacket and a pair of striped pants. The pants had been too big, but Héctor wasn’t about to stand up, and with the puke that would be all over them, people would just assume he’d drunkenly grabbed the wrong ones. The jacket had been just a little bit too small, and Ernesto had heard a suspicious sounding crack (accompanied by a whimper from Héctor; that was about all he could manage by then) when he’d jammed one arm in. He’d finally stopped breathing while Ernesto was scraping the enamel off the gold tooth. No one who had seen Héctor since they’d started traveling would think of the gold tooth. Ernesto had insisted on covering it up. Once he was sure Héctor was gone, he’d scrubbed out the mouth completely, then wrapped the body up and buried it in cloth, hoping that would slow down the discovery until the train was far away from anywhere Héctor Rivera belonged.  
  
Then he’d grabbed the chorizo. He must have left to get it at some point, but he didn’t really remember doing it. He’d tried to gently push a piece of it into Héctor’s throat, to make a cause of death, but it wouldn’t go. So he’d pushed it a little harder. And harder. Until it stuck.  
  
He’d taken the old suit back with him, and shoved the wedding ring into one pocket. It was under a false bottom in his trunk, along with the songbook. He didn’t know what he meant to do with it. It just seemed like it might come in handy someday. Maybe if the woman ever got around to asking about him, he’d say that Héctor had shed her like an old snakeskin. And…  
  
And why was his mind back in that train car?  Why was Héctor back in his mind again?  He’d been blessedly silent for eight years.  
  
He came around the last row of ridiculous exhibits into the inner sanctum, where a shriveled mummy was standing in a glass case.  
  
He walked up to it.  
  
It was, he thought, at least a real mummy.  There was no fakery to be seen up close.  
  
A pirate hat with a huge feather had been jammed onto the head, and an eyepatch was fitted over one eye. There were about a dozen gold chains hanging over a purple jacket. A sash was tied around the waist, covering the top of the striped pants, which seemed just a bit too big and…  
  
Something dropped to the pit of his stomach. It couldn’t be.  It would be ridiculous.  
  
The mouth was pulled up in a rictus grin. The eyes were closed. Was there anything behind them?  
  
_Did you close the eyes?_  
  
Ernesto shuddered. He couldn’t remember. Héctor had been unconscious for a while, though. His eyes may have been closed anyway and…  
  
No. Ernesto had closed the eyes. After wrapping him up but before burying him in the cloth, he’d closed his friend’s eyes. He remembered, because it had been interesting, the way there was nothing there. He could touch Héctor’s eyeballs without even causing a flinch. He’d closed Héctor’s eyes and his mouth and said, “Goodbye, amigo.” The mouth hadn’t stayed closed, but the eyes…  
  
No.  
  
No, this was not Héctor. Héctor would have been found, assumed to be a vagabond, and buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere up north, maybe even across the border in Texas, years ago. The train had been headed that way. There was no way this could be…  
  
“Like the bandido?” Ernesto looked over his shoulder. The huckster was grinning. “Don’t worry, we don’t usually charge people in the company.”  
  
“I’m not in your company,” Ernesto said, and tossed two pesos down in the dirt. “Where did he really come from? And I’m not a rube, so don’t bother with the bandido story.”  
  
“No idea. And the rubes are on their way, so the bandido story stands.”  
  
Ernesto smiled faintly.  
  
He thought about the Bandido during his performance that night, a part of his mind wondering if, once upon a time, that withered thing had stood beside him, cracking jokes and trying out his apparently unending run of new songs.  
  
But it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.  
  
Maybe it would be safer to burn it, just in case.  
  
Or maybe that would just draw attention, make people wonder why anyone would burn a sideshow mummy.  
  
The question ate at him for the rest of the sojourn in the show, overshadowing even his disgust at being forced back into this.  He didn’t haunt the tent, but he did find himself there more often than he wanted to be, standing at the foot of the display, looking up into that face. By the end of the run, Delmar (who had caught Ernesto looking more than once and thought it was funny) had decided that he was the living mummy and added some of the costumes to his horse act, and Ernesto had stood numbly on the sidelines.  
  
_Burn it. Burn it now._  
  
But the attention.  He didn’t need that kind of attention.  
  
And it wasn’t Héctor, anyway. It couldn’t be.  That kind of coincidence wouldn’t happen—that he _happened_ become a mummy somehow, and _happened_ to be bought by a circus, and the circus _happened_ to be the one Ernesto had been forced to take part in…  
  
The whole idea was ridiculous, and if he started acting on it, people might think he was crazy.  And worse, they might start asking questions about him that he didn’t want them asking.  
  
So he returned to Mexico City and the movie premiere.  He did interviews. He smiled for cameras and posed with Brisa.  He did a mock swordfight with Delmar in front of the theater where the premiere was held, and everyone clapped.  He was even asked to sing at the party, and he sang “Recuerdame,” and a man who was planning to make the first musical movie in Mexico came to talk to him about a starring role.  
  
The mummy wasn’t mentioned.  He didn’t have to do anything.  
  
But what if it was Héctor? Could they ever trace it back?  
  
He needed to get rid of it. But…  
  
He got as far as looking up the show, but it had gone across the border, and no one was asking questions.  
  
It would never make it to Oaxaca, and even if it did, they’d probably forgotten what Héctor looked like anyway, and even if they hadn’t, even _Ernesto_ couldn’t be sure it was him, and he had information that Imelda and the brat wouldn’t.  
  
So he let it go.  He had no choice.  
  
And there was no way, after all, that it could hurt him.  
  



	11. Soy Tuyo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Miguel spends the summer in Mexico City, learning to make guitars... and learning other things about life as an adult.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a random story, when Miguel is seventeen. I have to stop adding random stories to my list, so... adding it to this collection.

Miguel had made his first guitar in secret. He’d seen a broken one at the plaza, after a drunken fight when he was eight. The musician had started it, flirting with someone’s wife—though Miguel hadn’t really understood that part at the time, and had only gotten the whole story later—but the retaliation had been entirely out of proportion, taking the man’s livelihood and smashing it on the cobblestones. The fight had been pretty spectacular, and almost everyone was paying attention to it, but Miguel had been there, shining shoes, and all he’d been able to think was, “What does it look like on the inside to make such beautiful sounds?”  
  
So he’d gone to the smashed guitar and seen the inner structure, the little supports that kept the tension in the wood, the beautifully curved pieces that no one ever saw.   
  
It had taken a lot of experimenting over the next two years, starting with a wooden box and fishing line and eventually progressing to careful trials with wood he scavenged from the dump. There’d been long hours when he’d pretended to be out with friends, not to mention a few late nights in the shoe workshop, using clamps and saws to get the shapes right. He’d learned how to shape wood—Papá Franco had made patio furniture, and Miguel had helped him—and he knew how to be patient with the gluing and cutting, and he knew that precision on the functional elements was more important than the final decoration, no matter how much fun the outside was. You couldn’t grow up around Rivera shoes without understanding _that_ much. If the inside of the shoe wasn’t right, it would never matter how pretty the outside was, because the customer wouldn’t be able to wear it. He’d guessed—rightly—that the same was true for guitars.   
  
He wondered if Mamá Imelda’s talent for shoemaking had come from the inside-out approach she must have had to making guitars.   
  
Getting the shape right had been the hardest part, and he hadn’t learned until later that he should have made two thin pieces for the top instead of a single one. He’d drawn and measured and was still glad that he’d made the back and front of the sound box larger than he’d intended, because he’d ended up having to cut them down, which he suspected wasn’t how it was meant to be done. And the sides… even with the shaping with soaking and draping over a brace made of two coffee cans and chip tins, they had still been off kilter and needed cutting. But as he’d worked, he’d learned, understanding from the guts out how each move would affect the sound, even though he wouldn’t understand exactly _why_ until Carlos started with the physics lessons.  
  
Even so, that first guitar had sounded like what it was—mostly garbage—but he had loved it, and he had carefully used as much of it as he could salvage to rebuild it. It was hanging on his bedroom wall now, more a piece of abstract art than an instrument he would actually play.  
  
The second guitar had been more deliberate, made with the assistance of a book on the proper way to make a classical guitar, and he’d been able to make it in the open (well, except where Coco could see). It had been a scaled-down one, a fifth birthday present for Coco. He’d bought good cyprus wood for it, and spent most of a year on it after she’d first tried playing his guitar when she was four. It was bigger than she was. And the thought had come from nowhere: I can make her a better one. And he had. It was much better than his first one for sound and stability. Of course, it was also pink with a big, stylized rose on it, and the rosette around the sound hole was made to look like a pair of curved unicorn horns. Just because the inside needed to be right, it didn’t mean the outside couldn’t be a lot of fun.  
  
Coco had loved it. She hugged it like a stuffed bear and kissed it goodnight and insisted that Miguel teach her to play. And she showed it to everyone, including Miguel’s tutor, Carlos Navarro, interrupting their lesson to say, “Tell Gabi _I_ have a guitar now, too! Miguel made me my very own guitar! It has flowers! And there were maracas for baby Teto and Miguel is teaching me to play! I love brothers!”  
  
Carlos had stopped the lesson clock and asked Coco to show it to him up close, showing much more interest than Miguel thought strictly necessary.  
  
Two weeks later, after the lesson clock ran out, he’d said, “Miguel, I spoke to someone about you.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The guitar. The one you made for your sister. It’s beautiful. Much better than the toy I gave Gabi. I showed the video from our session to a man named Bonifacio Dominguez. He’s the one who made my guitar. He makes the best guitars in the city—or the country, as far as I’m concerned.”  
  
“You showed it to a real luthier?”  
  
“I did. I don’t know if this is anything you’d be interested in, but Dominguez was impressed. He’d be willing to take you as an apprentice this summer if you’d like. Well, not a full apprenticeship, that would be years, but you can study with him. I think it would be good for you. It’s something you’re good at that a lot of musicians aren’t. And you could stay with Tina and Gabi and me. Denny Calles moved out of the apartment over the garage.”  
  
“He did?”  
  
“He bought the house across the street.”  
  
“Oh.” Miguel bit his lip. “I don’t know what my parents would think.”  
  
“I wouldn’t have brought it up to you if I hadn’t run it by them first. I imagine they’ll have some ground rules, and so will I, but they said it’s up to you. I hope you don’t think I overstepped. I just… I never had a student who could even begin to do that before, and I’d love to see where you could take it. And as your father pointed out, you’ll need a new guitar to take to school. And on your road trip. Dominguez is more than happy to let that be your project, though you’d be helping him in the shop as well.”  
  
Miguel had been frightened—he couldn’t imagine spending all summer in the capital, even though it was only a year now before he’d be going off to the Conservatory—but in the end, the draw of learning from a master luthier had been greater than the fear… and greater than the ground rules, which had increased by a factor of about a million when all parties involved found out that Denny Calles’s cousin, Bridget Shaughnessy, was spending the summer with him in the house across the street, doing her own apprenticeship by helping him with his private investigation business. There was now a whole subsection of the contract (and it was a formal, written contract) involving not having guests in the apartment unless the door was open and the blinds up. After supper, there would be no visits without chaperones.   
  
“You’d think they don’t trust us,” Bridget said as she unpacked a picnic lunch onto a blanket, ignoring the rickety old table behind Dominguez’s shop.  
  
“Or that they think we have a lot more time than we do,” Miguel added, checking his watch. Most of the work at the shop was doing repairs, and he had two bridges to sand, a custom tuning peg to replace, and an intricate rosette to finish for one of Dominguez’s pieces… and that was in addition to the work he was doing on his own instrument, with Dominguez checking each piece to make sure it was perfect. Bridget was taking a break from hours at the library, going through old census records for one of Denny’s cold cases. On the rare occasions that they were both home before supper (or even for a couple of hours after it), Carlos’s four-year-old daughter had turned out to be a very effective security alarm any time she noticed a closed blind. (On the occasion that she’d spotted one when Bridget _was_ over, Carlos had issued what he referred to as “your only warning before the ticket back to Santa Cecilia.” Which hadn’t been fair, since it had been an oversight and nothing much had happened anyway.) If it hadn’t been for Dominguez—an old romantic who believed that only passion could create art—they wouldn’t have been able to get a moment all summer, and brown bag lunches by a rusty picnic table in a garbage-smelling alley didn’t exactly create a romantic atmosphere.  
  
Not that this had stopped them from giving it what Bridget called “the old college try.” Miguel doubted they’d film great movies about it, but he had a feeling that, for himself, he’d spend the rest of his life remembering the long, rambling walks they’d found excuses to take, the kisses stolen under the tree in the park near Carlos’s home, the acrid smell of her sunscreen, and the warmth of her body leaning against his as they shared cold chicken and iced tea and pretended not to notice the smell from the dumpster behind the fast food place next door to Dominguez’s workshop. When someone asked, “What does it feel like to be in love?” he’d think of this.   
  
Hopefully, he’d also think of whatever was going to come next, because they both knew this summer was the end of the line, but he wanted to hold onto it in his heart for as long as he could.  
  
“How’s your guitar coming?” she asked, pouring another cup of tea from the thermos.  
  
“Good. I’m working on the headstock now.”  
  
“Are you going to make it a skull, like your Papá Héctor’s?”  
  
“Maybe. I’m more in construction than decoration mode right now.”  
  
“Well, yeah. I guess.”  
  
“How about you? Catching any bad guys?”  
  
“Denny won’t let me near the bad guys. But I was the one who found the address for the guy who’d been sending little hate notes to the college professor.”  
  
“Cool.”  
  
“Yeah. Denny got him before he could really do anything, but the threats were enough to put him away.” She sighed. “I just want to be out there. I want to bring down these bastards myself.”  
  
“It’s dangerous.”  
  
She shrugged. “I just want to make the world better. I’m going to study forensics when I go to college in the fall. But I don’t just want to solve crimes. I want to stop them before they happen. Or at least before they get all the way to… you know, murder. Or other things.”  
  
“It’s a good thing to do. How does your dad feel about you leaving home?”  
  
“He’s scared. But Penn’s got a good forensics program, and a kind of club where you can get some real practice in. And… well, I’ve been looking at the FBI. Maybe I’ll train as an agent after I finish my degree.”  
  
“Working for the government.”  
  
“Is there something wrong with that?”  
  
“No. I just… well, it does kind of kill this fantasy I have where you decide that there are criminals in Mexico that need catching, too.”  
  
“Surely, you jest.” She took his hand and kissed his knuckles, then pulled it over her shoulder and settled into the crook of his arm, leaning against the shop’s wall. “We’re about two incidents away from a civil war, querido. They don’t talk about it on the news. They stick everything under ‘random violence’ and shootings and arsons. The stuff I’d be working on. But it’s not random. I mean, it’s more _West Side Story_ than _Gone With The Wind_ right now—stupid kids with guns—but it’s real. There are people trying to tear my country apart, and I’m not going to stand there and let them. I have to do something.”  
  
He kissed her head. “I know.”  
  
And he _did_ know. They’d been over the same territory three times this summer, and last winter when he’d gone up to Minnesota for Christmas. (When he’d unpacked upon coming home, he’d found the little plastic mistletoe decoration they’d spent a lot of pleasant moments under hidden among his tee shirts.) They’d even brought up the idea of him coming up to join her someday, but they both knew it wouldn’t happen, even in this brave new world of open and easy travel. His soul belonged to his family and to Mexico. He loved the sweet-smelling fields of Minnesota and even the icy beauty of winter in the north country, but he didn’t belong to it.  
  
He stroked her hair for a while, then said, “Soy tuyo.”  
  
“Yo también,” she whispered, then shook her head sharply. “No, no. That’s not right. We don’t _belong_ to each other…”  
  
“I don’t mean it like owning. I mean it like—belonging to my family or my church or… you know what I mean. We have this space between us, and we belong to it. It’s ours.”  
  
“Somos nuestros?”  
  
“Somos nuestros,” he agreed.  
  
“It’s good to love a poet.” She cuddled closer to him. “You should make a song of that.”  
  
“I’ve been working on one for a week.”  
  
“I get to hear it first.”  
  
“Absolutely.”  
  
Then she turned her face to him, and there were no words, just the quiet tea-taste of her lips and the soft roundness of her breast under his hand and…  
  
“Ahem.”  
  
They broke apart.  
  
Dominguez was standing in the back door, shaking his head. “You’re taking advantage of my good nature, Rivera. Lunch is over. Let’s get to work on that rosette.” He looked at Bridget. “And your cousin called. You are, shockingly, not at the library. Again. He’s on his way.”  
  
They went into the shop and Miguel went to his station. The tiny pieces of mother of pearl, inlaid into the ring of ebony, were as he’d left them, the round frame waiting for attention. They would eventually form a pattern of stylized stars, edging off the rosette and into the guitar’s main body, with a bit of pearl dust in the lacquer for luster. The work was fine, and Dominguez said it was better for younger hands.  
  
The woman who commissioned it was an astronomer who only played as a hobby. Miguel had met her. She was nice, and he wanted to give her a nice instrument, but it was definitely not a design he’d have chosen.   
  
Of course, the rosette he’d chosen to make was purple and orange on black—and he’d created the pink one—so he supposed he shouldn’t talk about taste level.  
  
Bridget understood the work well enough to try not to distract him—which she could do pretty much by being in his line of sight—so she waited quietly at the service desk, sorting braces for Dominguez until Denny showed up, grinning.  
  
“The two of you know,” he said, “that rules are not meant to be ‘those things we spend all of our time getting around.’”  
  
Miguel blushed, but said, “Hey, Denny. You’re one to talk.”  
  
He shook his head at Bridget. “You’re going to get me in trouble with his family.”  
  
“My family loves her. And you.”  
  
Bridget rolled her eyes. “We’re not doing anything,” she said. “And I got the sister’s name for you. She disappeared because she moved to Los Angeles. I picked her up in the city directory in the 1950s. She was naturalized in 1961. There’s a grandson still there. Do you want his number?” She smiled and pulled a slip of paper from her jeans pocket.  
  
He took it. “I’m telling you. Give up the FBI. I’ll take you on as a partner in the business.”  
  
She looked across at Miguel and gave him a slow, sad smile, then said, “Who knows? But not now. Maybe something will change.”  
  
But Miguel knew it wouldn’t.  
  
She kissed his cheek, then left with Denny.  
  
Dominguez bent down to examine the rosette. “It’s hard work,” he said, “but you’re doing fine, you know.”  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
“It’s always hard to give them up, though. When it’s time to let go.”  
  
“That’s what we do, though. Right?”  
  
He nodded, then started sanding the peg holes on his project. “While you were at lunch, I had a look at the design you made for yours. It’s interesting.”  
  
“You don’t think the orange and purple clash too much?”  
  
“The black setting will calm it down. I recognize the marigold petals. What are the purple spots?”  
  
“Oh. Flowers from home.” Miguel decided not to elaborate on the lie. The truth was, they were stylized forms of the marks around Mamá Imelda’s eyes, but Dominguez wasn’t close enough in his circle to know that. No one really was.  
  
“Flowers all around, then. Interesting. Do you have one for your young lady?”  
  
He shook his head. “I won’t finish before she’s gone. And then people would ask why there’s a forget-me-not, and I’d have to talk about it.”  
  
“So, put it on the inside where you don’t have to explain it.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’re making this for yourself, Miguel. You can keep your secrets and your heartaches inside of it. They’ll always be a part of your music.”  
  
“I don’t need forget-me-nots in the sound box for that.”  
  
“Forget-me-nots?”  
  
“Nomeolvides,” Miguel translated. “They grow on her farm.”  
  
“With a name like that, I feel it _should_ be on a Rivera guitar. Maybe your logo.”  
  
“I’m not going to have a business. I promised not to compete with you.”  
  
“Trust me. I’ll be long dead before you’re good enough to cut into my business.”  
  
“True. It’s going to take a lot longer than the summer to learn everything.”  
  
“I’m _still_ learning,” Dominguez agreed. “But you keep working at home. Check in with me every month for a while. I’ll get you through to journeyman level.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yes, really. Strangely enough, I don’t have a lot of students. I should have had children.”  
  
“Why didn’t you?”  
  
“Just never got around to it. It’s a little late now.” He set down the headstock he’d been sanding and came over. “It’s all right for you to use what I’m teaching you in business. There are few enough hand-crafters out there that we don’t cut into one another’s business very much.”  
  
Miguel smiled. “No. I... I made the one for Coco because I wanted to make her something. And I want to make my own. And someday—don’t tell—I’m going to make one for Carlos, because he’s always so happy that I do it. But mostly I just…” He ran his finger over the smooth ebony. “I just really love guitars. I really wanted to make them just because… you know… they’re guitars. They need to be made.”  
  
“I understand.” Dominguez leaned over the rosette and examined it. “But you know, there’s no law against making a living with what you love.”  
  
“That’s why I’m a musician.”  
  
“I need to hear you play someday. Are you playing anything while you’re here?”  
  
“I’m going to do a little recital at the Conservatory in July. Professor Moreno wants to see how I’m progressing. You can come if you want.”  
  
“I’d love to. Just let me know when, so I can close the shop for a couple of hours.”  
  
Miguel spent the rest of the afternoon bent over the rosette, doing the patterned inlay with small, delicate tools. As the day wore on and he started to squint, Dominguez gave him a magnifying glass that strapped around his head and fit over one eye. It helped, but he didn’t think it would ever make the hot fashion tips for the year.  
  
It was almost seven when Carlos came from the Conservatory to pick him up. Miguel hadn’t noticed the time—the long June day was still quite light—but apparently, Tina and Gabi had dinner ready. Carlos, who spent more time at home writing and teaching his private students, usually did the cooking, but Tina said she enjoyed his Conservatory days, when she could pretend to be a chef.  
  
Tonight, she’d cooked an Ethiopian lentil stew, though she’d bought flour tortillas instead of making the right sort of bread to eat it with. It was spicy even by Oaxacan standards, and very tasty. They ate at the picnic table in back, and Bridget and Denny came over to join them, which was usual as far as Miguel could tell. Denny brought groceries over as often as not, and no one talked about it, anyway.  
  
“I learned about Africa,” Gabi said. “In my day care. That’s why Mamá made African food. It’s much bigger than Mexico.”  
  
“It’s a whole continent, mijita,” Tina said. “Remember the difference between countries and continents?”  
  
“Like rooms in a house!” Gabi announced proudly. Miguel admired the way they taught her in every single conversation, without it ever feeling like they were forcing her to learn—he wanted to try that with Coco and Teto when he got home. “I have my room, and you have your room, and Miguel has the garage, and that’s an island!”  
  
“Right! And Tío Denny has a whole new continent,” Carlos said. “He should have more people living on it.”  
  
“I’m working on it,” Denny said.  
  
“No you’re not,” Bridget said. “I’m going to find you someone before I leave.”  
  
“What are you going to do? Look up ‘Wives for my primo’ at the library?”  
  
“Hey, Ti, do you have sisters or cousins?”  
  
“Well, there’s my cousin Lea… or how about Sara? What do you think, Carlos? I think Sara would be perfect.”  
  
Carlos laughed. “Your Tía Meg would love it. Mexican _and_ Jewish.”  
  
Bridget rolled her eyes. “If the point is to shock Aunt Meg, do you have any brothers?”  
  
“I spent enough time living with men in the Air Force, thanks,” Denny said.  
  
“Personally, I think he’s holding out for a Rivera,” Tina said. “Miguel… do you have any older cousins for Denny? I mean, your aunt would probably think he’s too young.”  
  
“I have lots of cousins. None of them are the right age. Maybe some distant ones up in San Pedro. What about that opera singer you rescued from her crazy boyfriend? She’s pretty.”  
  
“And there’s a man with clear and important priorities.”  
  
“What can I say?” Miguel said. “I love the prettiest people.” He grinned at Bridget.  
  
“It’s that depth of sentiment that makes him such a good lyricist,” she said, then reached across the table and mussed up his bangs. He grabbed her hand and wound his fingers through hers.  
  
Carlos made a show of gagging, more or less like the twins would do at home, and Miguel laughed, letting go of Bridget’s hand (but not until he ostentatiously kissed her fingers and she batted her eyelashes and fluttered her hand over her heart, just to annoy Carlos).  
  
Gabi, bored with this talk, climbed up on the bench beside Miguel. “Is it Coco time?” she asked.  
  
“Gabi,” Carlos said, “sometimes Miguel might want to call his family on his own. You don’t need to talk to Coco every night.”  
  
“No, it’s okay. If I call from the apartment, Coco will just make me go get Gabi, anyway.” Miguel pulled out his tablet—it was ridiculous to try and call on the tiny phone screen—and let Gabi get settled on his lap while the daily call went through.  
  
“You’re a little early,” Mamá said. “We haven't cleaned up from supper yet.”  
  
“Us either,” Gabi said. “Is Coco there? We had lentils.”  
  
“Lentils! You don’t say.” Mamá shuffled things around—Miguel could see a large meal still laid out on the table, and Abel and his girlfriend were feeding each other dulces at the far end. Rosa was going through her college textbooks, and Abuelita was trying to clear things around them. Papá came over from the workshop and tried to say hello, but Coco and Gabi were talking over most of it (about the extremely important subjects of Coco’s brand new red hair ribbon, and why Africa was like a big house). Miguel didn’t mind. He’d call Mamá and Papá later, and they would talk, and Papá would ask—in an overly casual way—about Bridget, and Mamá would tell him to let Miguel alone about that, and he would ask them about Santa Cecilia.  
  
But for now, it was the bigger family that mattered. He wished he’d thought to invite Dominguez.  
  
_Somos nuestros_ , Miguel thought. _We are ours._  
  
Sometime next month, or in August, this temporary world he lived in would fade, and the little apartment would become Tina’s office or Carlos’s file room. Bridget would head north and Miguel would head south, and they’d both figure out how to let go. Coco and Gabi would find other little girls who they just had to talk to every night.  
  
But it wouldn’t all go away.  
  
Because they belonged to it.  
  
To each other.  
  
Miguel cuddled Gabi as she giggled and laughed with Coco, and smiled at Bridget, while Carlos went to get his guitar for the night’s singing, and Denny helped Tina clear the table.  
  
_Soy tuyo_ , he thought, not to all of them, but to each of them, and to Mamá, and to Papá, and to Coco.  
  
_Soy tuyo. Por siempre._


End file.
